Should You Get an Online MBA?

This is a question I think a lot of you may be asking yourselves. There are certainly advantages of doing the MBA online.

• For one, you can do an online MBA program from the comfort of your own home even if the school you are using is thousands of miles away. You are no longer constrained by geography as you might be with a more traditional program. You could get your degree from a school in the US, even if you live in Europe.
  
• It takes away a lot of, but not all of, the time constraints of traditional classroom work. Although for most online programs, you will have regular some meeting times, there are opportunities to work at your own pace, watching lectures and such when they are most convenient to you. This time-shifting can be a real boon. You can still see your family, you can still work a job.
  
• You get to live where you already live. There is no on-campus housing or any of the craziness that goes with it. Big cost saving here too.

Now, as with all things, there are tradeoffs.

• No, or limited, classroom time. Some people need this time to really get away from their lives and focus on the material. It's really easy to get distracted with TV, facebook, the kids, the spouse, the mail, the phone, the dog, the whatever. There are a ton of distractions out there and a classroom setting is essential for some.
  
• Somewhat limited access to others. I know the internet is a great place and the technology has come a long way, but you don't make the same connections over email and chat like you do in a real classroom setting.
  
• Somewhat limited access to professors. Yes there are resources for asking questions, but does it really equal the classroom setting where your peers can ask follow-up similar questions and a great discussion can ensue? Can your professor give you the one-on-one attention like he/she can give in a more intimate classroom setting?
• Possibly more money. The online only program at my school was more expensive than the professional program I attended. This didn't make sense to me, but yeah. All costs factored in, you might be spending less, or you might actually be spending more.
  
• Industry respect? The internet is gaining more and more acceptance everyday in all walks of life, but I don't think it's quite there yet with respect to how employers view online degrees. It might take some explaining that it's the same degree as the classroom guys got. And it's all about which school you go to. Make sure it's got a name that people have heard of.
  

So should you get an online MBA. Only you can decide that. I considered the option when I chose my program. I decided that I had too many distractions at home at the time and that I needed to get away to class in order to be really able to focus. Additionally, I felt there was a lot of value in being able to talk to my peers on breaks and have access to the professor directly.

The MBA, almost two years later.

I graduated in the P2MBAS08 class, which means it was spring of 2008 when I got my MBA. Although it's not quite two years since I graduated, it has been more than two years since I last updated this blog. It's about time for an update.

Well, a lot has happened to me in the last two years. Soon after graduation, my personal life took a nice dive. I got divorced and had my house foreclosed. Not good there. Yes, even awesome MBA's can manage their money poorly. We were overextended on the house and our money problems caused a split in our marriage. Them's the breaks.

Since then, I've gotten my life back on track. I'm living well below my means and have a great new girlfriend. So, personal life is going great!

What happened in my professional life with the big, fancy MBA?

Well, not a lot to report there. Like most of my MBA cohort, I stayed at my job. My intention with the MBA was to get another job but after graduation, my employer gave me a giant raise. The giant raise was, as they say, the golden handcuffs. I've stayed here ever since.

Looking at it financially, with my new raise, the MBA gets an ROI of 3 years. Pretty awesome. The loan won't be paid off by then but that's when my newly adjusted income will catch up with the tuition I sunk in. Nothing to shake a stick at.

Besides the financial bonuses, the MBA has paid off in other ways. I'm much more familiar with the inner workings and inner motivations of the different departments within my company. Our contract with NASA is up for rebid, with the award coming out any day now. I got to see the rebid process happen and I'm a lot more in-tune with all the inner struggles involved in the rebid since I'm armed with my MBA knowledge.

I am really happy that I got my degree. It didn't result in my instantly landing a C-Level job or anything like that. I didn't expect it to. That was more of a ten year plan, anyway. What it did do was get me into a higher strata that will have huge long term career benefits that I am only just now tasting.

Now that my personal struggles are mostly handled, I am getting my life back on track. I'm saving money, soon to start investing. I've got a plan now that I didn't have while the divorce was happening. I'm optimistic about the future.

Management, Entrepreneurship and your MBA

I can't believe it has been more than a full year since my last post. It's gone incredibly quickly. In terms of my degree, since we are graduating in April I am pretty much 5 months away.

We have taken some very interesting classes over the last year. One of them, Business Law, really inspired me. The teacher was so great and I found the material so interesting that I momentarily considered selling my soul to go become a lawyer. That was just a brief lapse in judgment though. :)

Now that I have another year experience under my belt and another year of business school, I am finally feeling that I have some perspective on the business world. Of course, you can never really be an expert in it until you've put 30 years in, but I'm now beginning to see just how much skill and hard work it would take to run a business successfully. From what I'm seeing, the biggest part is your management team.

As far as I can tell, and again I'm not expert, your management team is really the singly most important thing in business. As I see it, there should be a course called "Picking the right management team". The crux of it is that an A+ management team can take a C- idea and be successful, when a C management team can screw up even an A+ idea.

And everyone knows it.

If you were thinking about starting a business, the most important choice is your team. Investors know it. A rock solid management team makes all of the difference in getting funding. There is no question that you have to have a good idea and a good plan, but it's so critical to everything that your managers are great and know their stuff.

This semester we are taking two classes, 'Entrepreneurship' and 'Venture Finance'. These are great classes but it's becoming clearer and clearer that you have no chance of success in going the startup route without some great contacts. You need to enlist some great managers, you need to enlist some great advisers and you need to enlist some investors that are compatible with your plan. It's not something that you can go at alone.

Even short of the entrepreneurship route, in established businesses it's still important that your team be top notch. You can't do everything by yourself, the better your top level managers are, the better your chances of success.

So what has this great perspective gained me? Well, I know I need to step up my game in terms of networking. It's truly not what you know but who you know. It's an ancient saying but it's so right. Team building is a people skill and it's something that takes a lot of work. So get started.

Wherefore art thou?

It's now November, I haven't given any love to my blog since April. I guess I'm not such a hot-shot blogger like I thought I was going to be. The post prior had been a long time coming too. I really am bad at this.

Anyway, what has happened in the meantime?

Well, my first term classes (managerial accounting, economics, and professional writing) gave way to my second term classes. These classes were Finance, Marketing and Speech. They went well for me. Our Marketing prof was really great and was awesome to listen to. Finance was a tough one, but it had to happen. You can't get an MBA without learning about the CAPM. Speech is a two term course for us, meaning that we are taking it again this term.

In fact, it has been so long since I last posted that it is already the middle of the third term.

Our third term classes are Statistics, Production/Ops management, and Speech. They are interesting classes but trend towards the boring. The stats class is kind of a review for a lot of us from undergrad statistics. I took stats 1 & 2 as an undergrad CS major, so it's not so terrible for me. I pity those who never took stats though. We are learning to do all of the arithmetic parts mechanically using excel.... so it's not so much the math that they are teaching, but the interpretation. This is nice.

In ops we played a game demonstrating the bullwhip effect. It was pretty cool... it was called the "beer distribution game". Basically, you had teams that represented the supply chain from production to retail of pallets of beer. The retailer would place orders and the distributor would take the orders and fulfill them, placing orders to their wholesaler who would do the same to the manufacturer. Everyone would pay penalties for backorders or excess inventory... it was an interesting demonstration of the bullwhip problem. Hopefully we learned something there. :)

The third month

I haven't written here in a while. In fact, I never posted about month two... but month three has come and gone. We are already mostly done with this semester; only two classes left. It's pretty amazing.

With that said, my courses are going pretty well. They are a little difficult, but nothing I can't manage. I enjoy the diversion of studying so it's a good get-away to come to class.

My classmates are real pros and I am learning a lot. I'm very glad I took the plunge and tried this.

On Group Work - 2

We have our second class weekend tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it. I will blog it when I get a chance.

Since my last post I have worked quite a bit more with my group. I am very pleased with the results. The conferencing system that UF uses is Centra. It has it's limitations, I wish the application sharing portion allowed colaborative editing of document, but that application sharing tool really saved our bacon. We were able to discuss and prepare our case spreadsheet all online from across the state. The process worked out really well.
I'm very pleased with my group too. They are SMART and they are motivated. In the past I haven't been too thrilled with group work because my groups tended to be slackers. But that was undergrad. These people (me included) are paying pretty good money to be here and they want the best out of the experience.

UF MBA Centra

On Group Work

Since our MBA class is only one weekend per month, most of our learning will happen out of the classroom. The approach for making this happen is to give us assignments. It looks like most of our assignments during this program will be group projects.
Our group has two projects for this month. One is for accounting and the other for econ. The first is straightforward but may be difficult, the other seems easy and not much work but may prove to be more difficult than it should be.
With accounting we have some problems to do on a case study. It's not too difficult and we should get it pretty easily.
With econ, all we have to do is come up with two topic options for a term project. That's it, come up with two possible topics. It will be about 4 sentences worth of work, should be easy right? Yes, it should be. But somehow, that is turning into something that is not so easy. It's not because our group is having problems, in fact, we all agree pretty easily and we all know what's going on... it's just that it is an important decision and we haven't come up with a really good idea yet. This is also complicated by the fact that we are not in face-to-face range. We are teleconferencing and all of that. It's not easy to align schedules so that everyone is able to meet telephonically. We are moving it a little bit toward non-synchronous communication channels like e-mail but that has it's weaknesses too.
All in all, it's part of the learning experience to work in these groups and I think it will work out well but one major lesson is that there is nothing like a face-to-face meeting.