This week, I saw yet another article suggesting that aspiring tech leaders don’t need to attend business school in Silicon Valley. I was very proud to see that the Foster School of Business was featured prominently and favorably in the piece: “Foster is one of a few, highly regarded business schools situated far from the Bay Area with a strong tech contingent among its graduates.” I for one lived this example and so many of my school colleagues went on to prominent tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and others.
However, and this won’t be a surprise to many of you, I wish that there would have been additional focus on the evening program offered at Foster, which is a big contributor to tech talent in the area. As a proud graduate of the evening program, I had an opportunity to experience the value of working and going to school, and for that, I am thankful. Evening school provided a lot of benefits that I wouldn’t have had going full time, and I firmly believe it gets lost in the mix of rankings, exit salaries, and other datapoints. Here are a few to consider:
First of all, your classmates are working in tech right now. You interact, discuss, and argue with employees of great tech companies and up-and-coming startups. Every class I attended had current employees of big tech firms discussing ideas, giving their take on real-world case studies and talking about company culture. One particularly great example during my time in business school, Microsoft had very famously shifted away from stack-ranking employees to an all new review process. Collectively, my classmates had spent decades there as developers, marketers, and program managers, and shared their honest thoughts about the shift, how it affected their teams, and how they expected company morale to shift as a result of the change. This experience was not unique – like many business schools, we talk about tech giants and disruptors daily. We just happened to have first-hand examples of the daily impact of big company shifts.
Secondly, you apply what you learn the very next day, and this matters. It’s a simple enough concept – study marketing or finance and you now know a few more reasons why a SWOT or cash-flow analysis is important at work the next day. But in a work-compatible program, your classroom discussions continue to evolve as you do. Much of a business program involves learning how to ‘think like an MBA’ through problem solving and analysis. As the program progressed, my classmates would share increasingly complex (and very timely) examples from work in classroom discussions. This was not only a reflection of the applied learnings from classwork, but also highlighted the fact that many of my classmates were being promoted to roles of greater scope and responsibility along the way. By my third year of school, we were no discussing examples from before business school, rather, we were continuing to discuss and challenge business problems faced daily inside companies.
Lastly, your network is real time. Networking is a crucial part of any business school, and evening programs are no different. However, the recency of your network’s connections cannot be understated. Need to talk to someone at Microsoft or Starbucks? Your classmates can contact their current work colleagues to connect you. As your classmates move into new roles, this continues to expand your network before you leave the program.
In closing, many of these benefits aren’t clear or well-articulated by rankings and exit salaries. However, choosing a business school obviously involves many factors beyond what I’ve presented here. The big takeaway here is that non-traditional programs offer hidden benefits, which could be the difference between a good program and a great program for the right candidate.
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