So I had a sobering moment today. As I was sending an email to the General Manager at Saks Fifth Avenue to invite her to speak to the Retail & Luxury Goods Association, something hit me. I was sprucing up my email signature by adding President, Retail & Luxury Goods Association and I noticed that my signature also said MBA Candidate 2010.
My heart sunk. Just a year and a half ago 2010 seemed so long ago, and now… it’s 2010. So what does this all mean, well for me it means that I have 7 short months before I start working. For most of my classmates it means it’s crunch time to find a job and make some hard decisions. While B school is a great thing in the sense that you get two years to learn, network, and sometimes party (just a little bit), you also sometimes get an inflated value of your true worth. We just paid a huge amount of money to get educated at one of the best schools in the country, so yeah, maybe we’re a little cocky, but this job market is certainly bringing a lot of MBA’s back down to reality. In my opinion, when the going gets tough, as it is for a lot of 2010 graduates, you have to evaluate what will really make you happy in your new career. An MBA is a long term investment, like any investment, you have to manage it well, learn when to make tradeoffs, and realize that if you’re patient the payoff may be better than you could’ve ever imagined.
Amina