Online MBA Forum

I've had several people comment about GMAT since I did a couple of entries about passing the GMAT with good scores to enter into your chosen MBA. The most often asked question was about whether there is a correlation between the GMAT scores and the results gained during the MBA program.

I'm going to do some research about that, but I started by chatting to a couple of people who had studied an MBA program. Their comments were interesting. They say that the GMAT tests skills that you need to be able to study well on your MBA program, but it does not test the kind of skills you acquire on the program itself; so the two do not necessarily have a direct effect on each other.

More later as I find out more.

Following on in the research about women studying for an MBA, the second aprt of the report "Women and the MBA: Gateway to Opportunity" looks at the levels of satisfaction that women feel with their business school experience.

95% of women expressed satisfaction with their experience, with the most rewarding activities given as involvement with activities and other students, curriculum and class size, group work and case studies, and acquiring business skills. However, they did raise some issues, in particular adequate opportunities to work with female professors, an aggressive environment and the perception that women were less qualified.

MBAs are so influential in today's management environment that the number of women taking MBAs has to be a concern - they are, after all, tomorrow's senior managers.

When I read the research I was writing about yesterday, I first found it quite difficult to accept. I felt that I must know at least as many women as men who had studied on an MBA program. However, when I started to consider this seriously, I realised that although I must know twenty or thirty men who have an MBA, I can only think of 4 women that I know who have an MBA.

I was reading some interesting research about women entering business schools for MBAs. Apparently only 30% of entrants are women - compared with 44% of entrants into medical and law schools. This statistic has been static for some years now, so it appears that women entrants have plateaued. However, 95% of women who did enter and took their MBA were satisfied with the outcomes of their program.

The study, "Women and the MBA: Gateway to Opportunity" from the University of Michigan, suggested four major reasons why women may not pursue an MBA. These were listed as:
A lack of role models
Business careers seen as incompatible with work/life balance
Lack of confidence with math abilities
Less likely to be encouraged by their employers.

Sunday - a wonderful day, because for me it's a day without work or study. The advantages of taking a break from an intensive program such as an online MBA are many. You can work harder if you know there is going to be time without work or study; working towards the next break.

Time without work also means that you give your subconscious time to work through information that you've taken on board. You may well find that having had a break you work that much better when you come back to problem solving and similar activities - and often a new perspective as well. This is really important when you are studying an MBA program, you need to be able to think outside the square in order to develop new solutions.