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MBA for Engineers: How engineers can stand apart in their applications
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Support for MBA Podcaster comes from Clear Admit, a leading educational counseling firm that guides applicants through the process of applying to top MBA programs. Founded by Wharton graduates, Clear Admit has become a leader in the MBA admissions counseling industry and is regularly interviewed by BusinessWeek, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist’s business school sections. Visit clearadmit.com for a robust offering of advice and commentary on your application or send your resume directly to podcast@clearadmit.com for a free evaluation and discussion of your application strategy.
Transcription:
Welcome to MBA Podcaster, the only broadcast source for cutting edge information and advice on the MBA application process.
I’m Heidi Pickman.
We often get the question ‘does an MBA make sense for engineers?’ And inquiries like this one that was posted by an engineer on our Facebook forum.
My profile in a nutshell:
GMAT 750
GPA Engineering 3.8
Career: Manager, Risk Management at Wells Fargo and part-time journalist.
Extra Curricular activities: Debate, prize winning crossword puzzle contestant, martial artist, bodybuilder
Community service: - Hurricane relief, Red Cross volunteer,tutor underprivileged children.
Also, I write science fiction and hope to be published one day.
Let’s call him Thomas. He wants to know if he would be a good fit for business school.
To answer the question and more, I spoke to an admissions consultant, several students, and a couple of deans about engineers and b-schools.
Which schools typically really like the engineers?
How should applicants with engineering backgrounds present themselves to schools, especially if they’re a self-described ‘pocket-calculator nerd’, i.e. your stereotypical engineer?
What should applicants with engineering backgrounds emphasize on their applications?
How can the engineers round out their skills before they apply?
Which are the graduate degree options for engineers?
What’s the career track if you get an MBA versus just stay in engineering?
So, what of Thomas and the rest of his engineering compadres?
“For the record, we love to see the engineers apply.”
That’s Beth Flye, the Assistant Dean and Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at Kellogg School of Management.
Is it just Kellogg that likes engineers or do other schools want engineers to apply for their MBAs?
Betsy Massar is the founder and CEO of Master Admissions, an MBA Admissions Consultancy.I asked her which schools like engineers.
“Everybody loves engineers.Who wouldn’t? Every school is going to want an engineer as long as they’re engineer that is going to be able to add to the class.If you look at the top schools, you’ll see that about 33 to35% have entering students with engineering or science or technical disciplines in their degrees. Harvard’s class of 2011 has 33% entering students with engineering degrees or science-related degrees.The Stanford Graduate School of Business has 36%.”
I asked her why she was so enthusiastic.
“Almost all MBA programs that have concentrations in management or strategy would be delighted to have strong engineering students apply. And it’s not just because they are good in analytics, but they have experience in real world projects and in working. For example, if they’re a software engineer, they may have already worked in tech, at a start up. Given the way the economy is going and business is going, that can certainly add to the conversation that goes on in the business school classrooms.”
Okay, so Thomas is the engineer that could go to business school. What does it take to get in?
Beth Flye of Kellogg says that most schools look for the same things in engineers as they look for in their other applicants.
“We’re most interested in the quality of a person’s work experience. Quality meaning such things as how has that person had impact at their organization. It could be P&L, it could be from a management standpoint, do they have evidence of progression, what skills have they developed. How does their particular professional experience tie to their post-MBA goals, at least their goals that they have articulated.”
Engineers can get a regular MBA or because of their technical background they can apply to a dual MBA-Masters in Engineering program. Not surprising, one of the best of those dual programs can be found at M.I.T. and the Sloan School of Management.
I spoke with Don Rosenfield, the director of the dual-degree M.I.T. Leaders for Global Operations or LGO program about the ingredients for a successful application. Rosenfield says that M.I.T. wants high academic performance and achievement and demonstrated leadership skills for both their regular MBA programs and the specialized LGO program.
Rosenfield says leadership can be demonstrated in various ways.
“Ability to work in teams, ability to work with ambiguous data - you look for things like can they deal with difficult situations. Do they have independence of thoughts and action? There’s a whole series of behavioral characteristics that the school looks for.”
He also says they look at what the applicant has done since he or she graduated from undergrad.
“Well for commitment to operations, we look at what kinds of jobs, what kinds of issues they’ve worked on. They don’t necessarily have to be working directly in operations or manufacturing, but they have to show in their interviews and their essays that they are very interested in that area.
OK. On paper you look great. You’ve got great test scores, good grades, and several years of work experience with increasing responsibilities, but Flye says that you need to differentiate yourself from others in the applicant pool.
“The way to do that is to present your authentic self. Who you are, not just the what information, I say, but if you pick up someone’s resume’ that you don’t know, you see some data points, you see some facts. What you do not see is their story. And that is what we are really, really interested in is that person’s story. And that’s where the essays come into play and that’s where the interview comes into play.
Betsy Massar advises that engineers should NOT write their essays all about engineering and their work.
“But to talk about some of the other things that they’re interested in such as reading or movies or sports or anything that indicates that they do more than sit in front of their computer. And I say that because I’ve met so many interesting engineers that have so much else to talk about but for some reason they think that’s the strongest part why they’re applying to business school.”
Kellogg’s Flye concurs. She says if you’re an engineer with great quant skills – this is evident in other parts of your application.
“What is most important in your approach as an applicant is to be holistic about yourself.We want to know all about you. Not just the fact that you have great grades and perhaps a strong GMAT score and strong quantitative skills...But we want to know about your professional experiences. We want to know what your endeavors are. We want to experience through your essays and your interviews who you are. That is very, very core to how we evaluate applicants.”
Massar suggests some specific ways for engineers to demonstrate their well-roundedness.
“Get a hobby.Or look back on their own history and don’t be afraid to explore some of the things they used to like to do other than play computer games.”
One of her clients is a perfect example – he’s an engineer
from
“As I was getting to know him, I asked him what he would have done if he did not take a degree in engineering. And he said “acting.” Then I found out that he had been in all of his school plays in high school and in undergraduate. That’s a beautiful thing for him to talk about in his essays. He of course was ‘well, it’s not relevant; it’s too long ago.’ But anybody who wants to get up on stage and act and also can run a computer program at the same time in their brain is a wonderful candidate for business school.”
The essay is a great way for an engineer to showcase verbal skills – just in case verbal test scores are not quite as high as quantitative scores.Shortcomings in verbal scores don’t necessarily relegate engineers to an engineering career. Flye says Kellogg doesn’t have a minimum score requirements.
“We don’t make a decision isolated solely on one area of criteria.So is it possible, in the case of a person with an engineering background, if that person has a lower verbal score, however one wants to define that, is that a deal breaker? Not necessarily at all.”
Rosenfield says that M.I.T. also is concerned with the entire application.
“We look at all the data, test scores, undergraduate achievement. We recognize that test scores can sometimes not give an accurate picture.Certainly a low test score will be an indicator, but there’s no point that we say we won’t consider ‘x’ and we won’t consider ‘y.’ We’ll certainly look at the scores, but we try to keep it in context.It largely depends on what the rest of the pattern says.”
But if you’re really worried about your verbal and writing skills, Flye has an idea.
“Be proactive. Take a class in that area.”
Massar says if you’re an engineer, don’t jump to the same false conclusion many people do when it comes to engineers and the alphabet.
“They get a bad wrap for being bad writers. I talked to an engineer when he was first entering business school this year. I told him that I was a professional writer. He said I really could use some of your help because I’m an engineer.I went to M.I.T. I couldn’t write to save myself. And I’ve seen his writing. His writing is wonderful. I think engineers think they can’t write, when they can write very clearly. I think some English majors seem to write business writing as it’s the great American novel or they’re trying to channel Barack Obama’s speech writer. And that doesn’t necessarily make for good business communication.”
Massar adds that engineers tend to write to the point and in business writing, it’s about telling the audience what they need to hear in order to make a decision.
So let’s say you’ve got the work experience, you’ve written a killer essay and you were accepted into business school. What might be some good things to know?
Margo Villadelgado is studying for an MBA and Masters in
Engineering Management at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. She has an undergraduate degree in systems
engineering and economics from the
“Really think what it is that you want to do after business school, both immediately and in the future. And really look at what skills you have and what areas you need to fill in and what the business school can do for you - doing some self assessment to make the most of your two years at any business school.”
That seems like a lot of time, but it’s not when there are dozens of courses to choose from.
“It’s a matter of prioritizing which classes and which opportunities I want to pursue in such a short period of time because there’s a lot of great courses and opportunities.
For example, one of the classes that I took that kind of combines both healthcare and marketing was biotech marketing, so looking how healthcare companies approach the marketing discipline and how it differs from a consumer product that is being marketed.”
She’s also taking an experiential learning course.
“One of the ones I’m working on right now is called Newvention. It’s an integration with the business, law, engineering and medical schools. We’ve teamed up to look at the medical device industry, see if there are unmet needs in different areas, and go from the entire process of conceptualizing an idea, prototyping it and looking how you would introduce it to the market.”
Karla Krause worked for Dell for four years in various roles including production scheduling, capacity planning and outsourcing before she enrolled in the MIT Leaders for Global Operations program. Her MBA will give her a more complete picture of the supply chain.
“I’m planning to go back to Dell in a supply chain related function.I’ve been in some parts of the supply chain, but I haven’t done much with the outbound or logistics, the back end portion.What I’m looking to get an expertise in is once the product leaves either the manufacturing facility or the distribution center, how does it get to the end customer. What’s the optimal networks and which vendors do you need to involve there, what are all the implications and where can you become more efficient or save money once the product is made to getting it to the end customer.”
Iker Marcaide is Krause’s colleague at Sloan. He has an
undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering and Masters in Industrial
Management from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in
“To put it simply, it’s how you design not only processes to minimize wastes, but also how can you effectively reach the outputs you desire in an organization by making it highly efficient and effective.”
Villadelgado, Marcaide, Krause and their engineering colleagues don’t go to school just to fill holes in their skill sets. The end goal is to advance in their careers.Here’s Krause.
“If you would like to move up and become an engineering manager, or a general manager of engineering or even a VP of the technology sector, you really have to have the business skills. I mean, ultimately, businesses are there to make money and you have to be able to see how the projects are either viable from a financial standpoint or how the projects fit into the overall goals of the company or how they align with the financial health of the business. I think it’s critical and just an absolute perfect pairing to be able to have the engineering technical knowledge and get the business knowledge to know how to apply it. Because ultimately if you move up you’re not going to be doing a lot of the engineering work, but you still need to be able to understand and articulate the engineering projects.”
M.I.T.’s Rosenfield says that engineers with business degrees don’t only move up but often rise to positions of leadership.
“We can offer students the possibility to go into a technology company, work in both the technical and management arenas and rise up significantly.Many of our students go into these companies and experience a formal rotation or if not experience a different variety of jobs and that prepares them for leadership. Students who have been out of the program for a number of years, they are reaching major positions of leadership in these companies.”
Marcaide names examples of positions for which his colleagues in the Leadership for Global Operations program have been hired.
“A sample of positions that the previous class than myself reached was operations manager, transformational leaders, supply chain managers.I think there is also a big trend now into energy.So I think we’ll see people from my class taking leadership positions within energy in manufacturing companies as well.”
But he’s decided to take another route and will become an entrepreneur.
“I found a very interesting optimization problem that we can apply to financial services. So I’m actually going to take the start-up or entrepreneurial route of applying operations management to a non-traditional problem in financial services.”
In other words, engineers who receive an MBA have all the choices a regular MBA has and then some. And they’re in demand says Massar.
“A business school student that has an undergraduate degree in a quantitative hard heavy duty engineering discipline plus a business school strategic framework plus the training they will get in leadership and interpersonal skills especially in the schools that have a focus on leadership development, those students will be well positioned to enter into any company, strategic planning group or in a management consulting firm or even in the financial industry.It’s the way someone thinks about the problem is what the recruiter will probably be looking for.”
Recruiters love you, and just to hammer the point home, so do the b-schools.
“Engineers have been and will continue to be an attractive group from which business schools are recruiting.”
So engineers – get your pencils sharpened, your essays written and your applications mailed.
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This is MBA Podcaster, I am Heidi Pickman.
Thanks for listening and be sure to tune in next time when we explore another topic of interest in your quest for an MBA.