Thursday, September 30, 2010

That’s twice now I’ve heard business school described as an item on the “checklist”–ostensibly of life, I suppose–that I’d do well to address. I’ve shared my thoughts on education with you previously, and while my views haven’t changed much, I have been mulling over what another degree would entail. By no means has an MBA ever been presented to me as a rocket ship or anything like that. It’s less a device designed to punch through glass ceilings and more a mark, a kind of gold star next to my name that would aid me, give me the nod, for some future corporate reckoning.

I still don’t know if I buy this. Even if I did buy it, literally so, I’d have to contend with the two biggest roadblocks in my mind. There’s the issue of cost, where the product at hand would likely call for funding equivalent to 15,385 burritos, and here I can unequivocally state that I’d prefer the burritos. Comparatively speaking, my car ran me about 3,700 burritos, and rent–shelter–when I arrived here was roughly equal to 80 burritos a month. That Iron Man 2 Blu-ray I picked up earlier this week? Three burritos. Small-ticket item, obviously, but you get my point. Perhaps I’m undervaluing post-graduate education, though, and maybe an MBA is worth, like, 10,000,000 burritos.

There’s also the specter of classrooms and tests and group work for the sake of group work and due dates for projects of imaginary import. But those conceits are largely fakeable, provided you put in a modicum of effort, which brings me back to the central choice: should I continue to avoid additional schooling, hoping instead that hard work will win the day? In place of another diploma would be a renewed urgency to network and be scrappy, fearless, lucky. Or should I bite the bullet and succumb? What if b-school cost no burritos? That would be a very different proposition indeed.