MBA specializations

During some casual conversation earlier this evening, I realized that I get irritated when people talk about ‘MBA finance’ or ‘MBA marketing’. I realized that I feel like not continuing the conversation when someone asks me my MBA specialization. Later I spoke to Baada about this, and he too agreed about the lack of respect for the counterparty when this topic gets mentioned.

I think it has to do with a lot of people assuming that “MBA” is just a set of courses that one does in order to become a manager. Maybe they assume that one can become a manager in a particular domain by reading a set of books. Maybe they think that an MBA is just like any other course where you get “knowledge” rather than change your way of thinking (ok a lot of people say MBA is useless and suchlike but my MBA certainly changed the way I think).

Or maybe it’s just that people find it easier to classify. Sometimes people overdo it, to the point of stereotyping. I’m reminded of my last company which worked on two kinds of products (let’s call them Product A and Product B – details are, er, classified). I started off doing a bit of A and soon I became “Associate for A”. Soon, I started doing some other stuff, which would easily fall under B. Yet, the CEO kept referring to me as “Associate for A”. It was ridiculous, but somehow he couldn’t get this classification out of his head – even when most of my time was spent doing B.

Anyways, point I’m trying to make is that people are used to classifications in education. For example, in engineering you have electrical, mechanical, etc. – all very easy. Similarly in postgrad for medicine – you can easily classify as ‘eye’, ‘bone’, etc. So isn’t it the duty of “management” also to get duly classified? And it did help the classifiers that there were three or four major areas in which most MBAs sought employment, and this made classification convenient.

Most local MBA colleges use this “specialization” funda to optimize on the number of electives that they need to offer. From a couple of interactions  with people from local MBA colleges, I found that they had very few electives – the major choice that they had was in specialization. And once you picked your specialization, your set of courses would get more or less frozen which made it easy for the college to organize.

Some local MBA colleges seem to have taken this specialization thing to ridiculous levels. The other day, one of my cousins had come to me for career gyaan and he said “I’m wondering whether to do an MBA in Aviation or an MBA in media”. I completely lost it at that point and blasted him and asked him to work before thinking of an MBA. Hopefully the current bust will take care of such ridiculousness that exists in the colleges.

Even a large number of good colleges had this “specialization” funda. I’m told that IIMC had this funda of “major” where if you took five electives in a particular area, that would go on your degree certi as a “major”. However, I’ve never heard anyone from IIMC (even from those days when this classification existed) describing themselves as a “MBA in XXX”.

Anyway, the next time you ask me what my specialization was during my MBA, you’ll make sure that I lose all respect for you.