Chicago Booth MBA students (Harvard, Cambridge: eyeglasses, buy, top school)

[reppin_the_847]

No offense, but I do need to add that MOST U of Chicago students would not be tacky enough (like the OP seems to be) to flaunt their degree this vapidly in order to command attention. They're a smart bunch (that often came from money), so they're gonna tend to be more subtle about it.

[fightforlove]

You guys are idiots. MBAs cost 100 grand and are over-rated, everyone and their grandmother has an MBA these days. You can get a prestigious finance or consulting job without an MBA. Most successful entrepreneurs don't even have MBAs. If you just want to get laid, instead of wasting 2 years and 100K studying for an MBA, why not just move to Mexico and become a beach bum and pick up the college hotties that come down there on spring break?

[emathias]

This is one funny thread.

As a man about to graduate with a Masters from one of Harvard's other schools (i.e. not an MBA and not the business school), and someone who rents a room in Cambridge - my primary residence is still here in Chicago - from an attractive, funny, outgoing heterosexual female Harvard doctoral student - she's at the School of Public Health, I think women - or people in general - who are swayed into going home with a guy just because he claims to be from some school are kind of trashy. My Cambridge roommate thinks most HBS guys are "kind of douche-y", mostly because of their sense of entitlement. Then again she's pretty much the exact opposite of trashy, so she may not be their target type of girl.

So if you're into trashy women, then by all means get a degree from a school just so you can use that to attract them. Although if you have to order bottle service to complete the attraction, I don't think you'd be saving any money over just hiring escorts - I'm sure they like Booth students and grads, too.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by fightforlove

You guys are idiots. MBAs cost 100 grand and are over-rated, everyone and their grandmother has an MBA these days. You can get a prestigious finance or consulting job without an MBA. Most successful entrepreneurs don't even have MBAs. If you just want to get laid, instead of wasting 2 years and 100K studying for an MBA, why not just move to Mexico and become a beach bum and pick up the college hotties that come down there on spring break?

When I worked at startup-phase Orbitz, one of my favorite parts was hearing the experienced stories from then-CEO Jeff Katz. He has two M.S. degrees, one each from MIT and Stanford and when asked about MBAs, he'd say, "The only reason I'd get an MBA is to hear what my competitors will all be doing in the next five years so that I can do something different to beat them."

[chet everett]

Sometimes different is good, other times not so much -- Travel Game - About | Facebook

Travel Game

Mr. Katz could have learned a lot...

The kinds of people selected for admission to too tier MBA programs very often have a record of prior business and academic success that by itself makes them predisposed toward further acheivement in the realm of profit making enterprises. Folks that earn terminal masters degrees from well regarded schools in other areas tend to pursue career paths in government or other areas that are not particularly lucrative but often do afford one some kind of influence.
In either case these avenues are rather different than either the path that some follow going to less than stellar academic institutions(everybody & their granny...) or the extraordinarily fortuitious path that folks climbing a ladder of success sometimes follow -- I have known many people that have been involved with start-ups or early employees of tech firms who have not had any ability in making initial success "serial" and the real value of understanding not just the "looking back" aspects of MBA case-studies but in harnessing the predictive power of what will be a money maker and what will be a flop often comes from being "tuned in" to the kind of cues that one is very much more likely to encounter at a top flight MBA program than toiling at a more run-of-the-mill school and almost impossible to acquire in "generic" employment ...

The thought that anyone would seriously beleive the opportunity to attend one the finest MBA in the world should be morivation to "party down" or otherwise indulge in careless reputation damaging social behavior is badly out of step with the brutal environment that exists in the challenging business climate of today...

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by emathias

This is one funny thread.

As a man about to graduate with a Masters from one of Harvard's other schools (i.e. not an MBA and not the business school), and someone who rents a room in Cambridge - my primary residence is still here in Chicago - from an attractive, funny, outgoing heterosexual female Harvard doctoral student - she's at the School of Public Health, I think women - or people in general - who are swayed into going home with a guy just because he claims to be from some school are kind of trashy. My Cambridge roommate thinks most HBS guys are "kind of douche-y", mostly because of their sense of entitlement. Then again she's pretty much the exact opposite of trashy, so she may not be their target type of girl.

So if you're into trashy women, then by all means get a degree from a school just so you can use that to attract them. Although if you have to order bottle service to complete the attraction, I don't think you'd be saving any money over just hiring escorts - I'm sure they like Booth students and grads, too.

And by funny, I assume you mean stupid.

[chet everett]

There are those that believe success is more about "right time / right place" and those who believe it more about accumulated knowledge / experience. In my view the argument that bridges these ideas is embodied in a JFK quote: Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other...

[evolve123]

Originally Posted by fightforlove

You guys are idiots. MBAs cost 100 grand and are over-rated, everyone and their grandmother has an MBA these days. You can get a prestigious finance or consulting job without an MBA. Most successful entrepreneurs don't even have MBAs. If you just want to get laid, instead of wasting 2 years and 100K studying for an MBA, why not just move to Mexico and become a beach bum and pick up the college hotties that come down there on spring break?

An MBA from a TOP school is not overrated at all. Every empirical study has shown this. It allows one to make career transitions and get jobs at firms that they otherwise can't get into. If you're say an IT consultant who wants to do strategy consulting at mckinsey/bcg/bain, you have no shot unless you have an MBA because those firms go through a highly structured recruiting process.

I agree that for entrepreneurs, an MBA is not as nearly as useful since a lot of what you learn in b-school deals with existing business models and markets.

Moreover, the network you get coming out of a top program is highly invaluable.

[reppin_the_847]

This is true, but at the end of the day, the shallow gold diggers that you choose to target in the party scene could care less about all this stuff. In the end they want to know how many drinks you'll get them or how many Louis Vuitton purses you're gonna buy them. it will be hard to sustain a relationship with this kind of person, but I guess it can be done. Then again, if you're just floating from chick to chick maybe this type of thing would work out, but while you're actually in school, you probably won't have the big bucks in your pocket yet like you will after you're finally done with the program and onto your posh post-MBA job post. The whole Ivy League / elite schooling background calling card is more prevalent in the East Coast than it is in Chicago IMO. Chicago, after all, far outnumbers these types with Big 10 grads from around the Midwest.

Originally Posted by evolve123

An MBA from a TOP school is not overrated at all. Every empirical study has shown this. It allows one to make career transitions and get jobs at firms that they otherwise can't get into. If you're say an IT consultant who wants to do strategy consulting at mckinsey/bcg/bain, you have no shot unless you have an MBA because those firms go through a highly structured recruiting process.

I agree that for entrepreneurs, an MBA is not as nearly as useful since a lot of what you learn in b-school deals with existing business models and markets.

Moreover, the network you get coming out of a top program is highly invaluable.

[JBVirtuoso]

In that same vein, there are plenty of people in Chicago who barely know that the University of Chicago even exists. When I tell people here where I went to school, I've definitely gotten a lot of puzzled looks, or questions like, "Oh, that's at 95th and State, right?" Or people confuse it with UIC, which is incredibly common. There might be some chick in a random sleazy club that will care about your school, but as everyone else has pointed out, that will be a rare situation. And come on. If you can get into Booth, you're smart enough to know that you can do better.