The admission season is upon us, and some of you are done with the Interview process, while a few of you are yet to go through the process of some other B-schools.
Almost all of you have prepared the most desirable and effective answers to the most commonly asked questions in a management interview, i.e. 'Why MBA?'
But deep down, you know that most of the portion of the answer is far from the truth. But that’s fine! Don’t worry as you are not the only one with those thoughts. Where am I going? What am I doing with my life? Am I going back to school just to vault myself out of my current situation?
We all know what it's like to be an MBA aspirant. Working hard day and night to bell the
cat or other MBA entrance exams under lots of distractions or confusion over your future.
Here are some weird yet common reasons among management aspirants to pursue an MBA:
Don’t Want To Do Coding All My Life:
Statistics show that every year the majority of the MBA aspirants are Engineers. Majority of the Engineers who aspire for an MBA are either working or going to work in an IT firm as a coder, developer, tester etc. irrespective of his/her branch in Engineering. After working for only a couple of years in an IT firm in the same profile, the majority of them get bored with their regular monotonous life full of coding and start hating working in an IT firm. That’s when they think of an MBA as an escape from this monotony.
Don’t Want To Get Married:
One of the biggest fears among youngsters is of getting married. To avoid the same, they can go to any length, even if that means working hard day in and day out to crack the CAT or the other MBA entrance exams. At present, this is one of the
significant reasons among MBA aspirants, especially girls, for pursuing management.
In India, most of the students graduate before the age of 22 and start working. For parents, if a girl is working or has completed her education, they think she’s old enough to get married. As a result, she thinks of doing an MBA, studying hard and getting into an MBA college or her parents will get her married.
Will Find Good Girls in B-school:
This is one solid motivation among the Engineers, especially mechanical and civil, to pursue an MBA. These are those aspirants who pursue an MBA just for being in a relationship with a good girl.
Surprised? Don’t be, because the history of management institutes has many examples which state the credibility of the same. Even the management colleges have far better gender diversity than Engineering ones.
Will Get Huge Packages (in crores):
Getting an excellent salary package is the most critical and common motivating factor behind every aspirant who is working hard day and night to crack the entrance exams and join a good B-school. Most of them think that getting into a top B-school will give them job worth half or a crore. But the reality is totally different as only a handful of MBA students of the
top management institutes like IIMA, IIMB, IIMC, ISB, IIFT etc. get such huge packages while others fall under the average category. But yes, you will most probably get a package better than your erstwhile package.
Don’t Know What Else To Do:
This is one of the weirdest yet very
common reason among aspirants to get into an MBA program. For all those graduates, who don’t know what they want to do in their life or are not clear about their goals, the MBA is one of the primary choices.
Many aspirants who earlier had some other targets like cracking UPSC, getting into IES or get a government job through GATE etc. and couldn’t make it, also think of doing an MBA.
For most of us the answer to the question “Why MBA?” varies from earning more money, getting a better life partner, more respect in the society, holidays in abroad to the ones I mentioned above. We all have similar and vague reasons for doing an MBA, unlike the so-called genuine ones which we prepared for the
B-school interviews after lots of Google-ing.
Its okay not to have everything figured out, to not have all the answers, to wander without purpose…. makes us humans. Nobody has it all figured it out. Life is all about figuring yourself out and the stuff as we move ahead in the journey. Don’t lose it. We’ll all figure it out in the end.