Getting sponsored for your MBA

We recently discussed whether you should try and get your company to foot the bill for your bschool education. In that prior post, we offered some things to think about that you might not have considered. One other point that needs to be addressed – and this may be controversial, but when have we ever strayed away from that?

We hear that the sponsored MBA students are lazy. In fact, they’re sometimes accused of being L-A-Z-Y. That they are just sorta coasting. Biding their time. Phoning it in. Not fully engaged. Wasting the opportunity.

You appreciate what you pay for, right? You might want to think about this all-too-human phenomenon, that might be setting yourself up for two years of apathy, if you’ve got someone else footing the bschool bill.

Exhibit A for this assertion:

Yes, that’s Columbia Follies, which is meant as jokes and parody and satire… but a joke is only funny when it’s based on truth.

If you’re sitting here now saying you want the MBA for the education part of it, great. We applaud you. But will you be able to maintain that noble commitment to yourself in the midst of case overload and way too many models to run and all you want to do is go to Happy Hour and drown your DCF sorrows?

As ignoble as it may be, a big motivation for many people to do the homework and get good grades (yes even with grade non-disclosure) is because they need to land a great job coming out. They REALLY need to land a great job, given the mountain of grad school debt that they’ll be facing. So, double-motivation: need the grades to get the job, need the job to pay for this very expensive endeavor that they’ve embarked upon.

Will you end up just coasting, since you have a job secured already? Even more so: Will you be coasting, because there’s no threat of a student loan payment starting to creep up on your horizon?

Yes, some employers require a minimum GPA to get the tuition reimbursement, but it’s not like you’d need to be at the top of your class. The bare-minimum has this odd way of becoming an acceptable level of performance in certain situations.

Just make sure that you’re walking into all this with a clear head and honest assessment of who you are and how you will (truly) react under this situation. It would be a shame for all your pre-MBA excitement and enthusiasm to get drained out into apathy when you’re actually going through the grad school experience.