Why MBA?

Raleigh, NC

Why do you want to pursue an MBA, why now and what after the MBA?

These are the common questions all business schools ask in their MBA admission essays. I did not have an answer to any of these when I first thought of getting an MBA. All I knew was what I did not want. After 8 years of cranking out computer code, I lost the passion for programming. I cannot imagine doing the same thing 10 years from now. Programming used to excite me. During my undergrad and grad school, I spent endless hours in the computer lab, writing all sorts of programs in pascal, C, C++, Java and what not. Every time the program compiled and executed, I was elated. The prospects of getting on the plane to USA, making the big bucks and enjoying the standard of living in a developed country was enticing, and writing software was the ticket to it all. Just had to learn to punch the right keys and I would be on the way!

Growing up in Hyderabad, India, where every street corner has a "computer training center", I had seen plane loads of people around me get degrees in computer science, take the GRE, TOEFL, board the flight to the USA for grad school and go on to work in the tech industry after graduation. Dot-com fever was at its high, there was huge demand for techies in the US. The guy selling suitcases a few blocks from my house was making a killing. Business had never been so good.

Four years into my career I asked myself the question, who cares about all the complex sort and search functions I write? It's so embedded in layers of software, no one is going to know who wrote it and what for. That's when I decided to do user interface development. Writing graphical user interfaces (GUI - gooey) that people can actually use without losing their sanity was fulfilling. This was no escape from programming though. GUI development was just a different kind of programming. So this got old too. I started researching roles which I could grow into and how. An MBA would give me the flexibility to change careers and locations. It would shake the status quo, break the routine and make life a little more interesting.

Next step was to put together a concrete plan which I could write about in the essays. A plan that is feasible, doable and believable. Besides the plan I wanted to present different aspects of my personality in the essays. What followed were months of intense self analysis, putting all my life experiences under a microscope, questioning myself as to what drives me and what makes me tick and who am I as a person. In UNIX operating system, "whoami" is a command which returns the username you logged into system with. I was searching for a "whoami" command in real life. Looking back I think I took the MBA application essay questions a little too seriously. I wonder how much I gained from all that self introspection. Thinking of programming, dot com fever etc, I came across this video which is very amusing.