MBA's for Engineers? A Student's Perspective, Part II

Listeners with engineering backgrounds often write to us wanting to know how candidates like them fare in the application process, what can help set them apart from their fellow engineer applicants, what their degree options are, and what career opportunities will an MBA open up to them. We’ll address all of these issues (and more) in an upcoming podcast.

Today, I spoke with two current MBA students from the MIT Leaders for Global Operations program who were both engineers before coming back to campus and who are both using their MBA to expand their careers beyond the traditional engineering track. They both agreed that their MBAs will enable them to diversify their skills so that they can rise higher in their careers than they would have been able to if they had stayed purely with engineering. They talked about what they were looking to learn in graduate school and how that would help their career.

Karla Krause worked for Dell for four years in various roles including production scheduling, capacity planning and outsourcing before she enrolled in Sloan. Her MBA will give her the skills necessary to have a more complete picture of Dell’s business strategy.

“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... That is, once the product leaves the manufacturing facility or the distribution center, how does it get to the end customer? What’s the optimal network and which vendors do you need to involve there? What are the implications? Where can you become more efficient or save money once the product is made to getting it to the end customer?”

Iker Marcaide worked as a consultant before enrolling in the MBA program and he was looking to deepen his knowledge of operational excellence. Which is...

“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.”

Both of the students recommend graduate school to engineers who want to round out their skill sets and experiences beyond their background in order to expand their career opportunities.
Krause is going to advance in her company and Marcaide is going to 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.”

Learn more of what the students and the other guests have to say about MBA engineers in our upcoming show that will be in a couple of weeks. Other guests on the show include:

• Margo Villadelgado, student, Kellogg School of Management, who will share her experiences as an engineering student crossing over to the business world.
• Beth Flye, assistant dean and director of admissions and financial aid, Kellogg School of Management, who will talk about what engineers need to know when applying to business school;
• Don Rosenfield, director of the dual-degree MIT Leaders for Global Operations program, who will and talk about the specialized nature of MIT’s program and what it takes to succeed; and
• Betsy Massar, Founder and CEO of Master Admissions, who explains which schools like engineers and why.

Updated! listen to the full show here.