We started talking recently about the one-year MBA variation that is being offered at more schools these days. As we said before, with this program format, you often get an abbreviated core curriculum to cover the basic MBA stuff like accounting and finance, and then they set you loose to the electives.
Here’s a news blast for all you thinking about this option:
THE ELECTIVES ARE THE MOST FUN PART OF BSCHOOL.
Which sounds great, right? With the 1Y you get to blast through the not-so-fun part (the core) and get straight to the best part.
Not so fast, pardner.
We’re not convinced that this is a “best of both worlds” scenario.
Granted, EssaySnark hasn’t actually experienced this 1Y program ourselves, so this is pure conjecture, but…
We know that the first month or two of bschool (often the entire first semester) is a complete whirlwind. It’s totally exciting and you get to go do all this fun stuff with your new classmates or section mates or clustermates or whatever they call them at your school. There’s often pre-term trips and there’s orientation and there’s getting involved with some clubs and there’s RECRUITING for your summer internship and parties and oh yeah you have to go to class a lot. It’s great. It’s pretty stressful too, you’ll be busier than you’ve perhaps ever been in all your life before. It’s really overwhelming. But it’s great. And then the second semester (spring) is a little easier – not hugely so but a little – and you’re still mostly taking core courses and you’re going to happy hour and maybe there’s a spring break trip to somewhere amazing… And then you break for your internship, and then in the fall… you come back to campus… and you are SECOND YEARS!!!
You remember what it was like to be a senior in college? Where you’re the smart ones, and also the ones who got to coast a little? And the ones who were running the clubs as President and all that? The time when you ruled the school?
Right.
Well, that’s what the second year of bschool is like. Except with grown-ups (mostly).
The second year of your MBA program is AWESOME. Most people never want it to end. It can be really really great. One big reason (we assume) that you want to go back to school is to take a little vacation from life. Well guess what? That vacation happens in the SECOND YEAR. Not the first.
And if you’re doing a 1Y MBA — well, that vacation doesn’t really happen at all.
Again, we are NOT speaking from firsthand experience here – never did this one-year MBA track, no idea what it’s like in reality – but EssaySnark is guessing that a one-year MBA is a whole big chunk of the not-as-fun stuff of bschool and a tiny sliver of the YAY FUN!! parts.
So what’s the one big thing you miss out on with a 1-year MBA?
THE SECOND YEAR OF BSCHOOL!!
(Plus all the other possible risks that we talked about the other day.)
We’re not saying there are no advantages – sure there are. Just make sure you go into this an educated consumer. You must know what you want from the experience in order to evaluate which of these flavors of MBA is right for you.
If anyone has gone through one of these programs, we’d love to hear from you! Please post in the comments or send us an email (gethelpnow at this site), it would be great to learn more about it.
Tell us what you think.