Why Melbourne Business School?

As previously mentioned in your blog, you spent most of your academic life attending top-ranked academic institutions. Melbourne Business School, at the time of your decision, was not generally considered one of the world’s very best MBAs; the latest Financial Times had ranked it #75 in the world, below many US and UK schools which you have never heard of. However, you have heard of the University of Melbourne, and an Australian friend in Korea told you that Uni Melbourne was far and away the best school in Oz. He was from Melbourne. At the time, you did not think this detail was significant.

In your previous life, you had visited Sydney for a week and had found it magical. You thought you would like to live there, at least for a while. Obviously Melbourne and Sydney are very different cities with very different personalities, but you did not know this. To you, Australia was Australia, and you decided to apply to at least one business school in Oz. However, AGSM’s start date was not in September. It was in January. Because you wanted to start business school in September, you decided to apply to MBS, and not to AGSM.

You were accepted to half of the schools you applied to, including 2 M7s. Conventional wisdom told you to attend the 'best ranked' MBA program you got into. You believed the vast majority of business school applicants would do this. However, you were still curious about Melbourne Business School.

You decided to visit. You owed it to yourself and to MBS to at least see the school before deciding to attend another MBA program. Strangely enough, this was the only school you felt this way about; maybe it was due to MBS’ transparent admissions process and / or the friendly correspondence that you had with the school's representatives. When interacting with MBS, you did not feel like a number. At every other school you applied to, you did.

Suddenly, you were anxious to see MBS. You had to see whether the school was good, whether it fit the criteria that you had of a ‘top-ranked’ school… because you did not trust your Decision to a ranking made by a newspaper halfway across the world, in England.

Your school visit, as it turned out, was the very next day. You could not sleep that night, on the red-eye plane flight from Korea. You were alert, your mind was active. As it would be for all of first term.

***

When you visited the school, you saw a program that was extremely small (60 people per incoming class, since then, it has been reduced to 40), where the student dynamic is very different than the student dynamic at every other school you applied to. Specifically, MBS students seemed real; they were not concerned with superficially shaking your hand while telling you how amazing their lives were. Additionally, it seemed that everyone from the receptionists to the faculty and support staff were on first name basis with the students, and it seemed that everyone happily got along. The only other school that seemed even a little similar was Tuck. That being said, two main reasons you had originally applied to Tuck was because it was known for being small and personable, and because your girlfriend was getting her masters in nearby Brattleboro. You did not know this at the time, but you would break up with her mere months after your decision, for completely unrelated reasons. What you did know was Melbourne Business School's student body was literally 1/3 of Tuck's size. You thought about some of the ramifications of this, and realized that, at MBS, the administration would probably go out of their way to give personalized service to students. As it turned out, you were right.

The class you visited, Mergers and Acquisitions, was also interesting, and the teacher, David Trende, taught the material from a top down perspective. There was no showmanship in the class; none of the students were trying to outdo each other by trying to be smart*.

In sum, you absolutely loved the school, and you absolutely loved Australia. But that was not enough. The Question depended on whether MBS would be a blight on your resume... whether it hurt your chances of getting a job post-MBA. Though it seems utterly ridiculous now, you had stayed up nights thinking about this.

So you had an impromptu meeting with MBS Careers, who shared with you their most recent employment statistics; at the time, their employment success rate 3 months after graduation was something like 96%, and fully 10 people from the last graduating class were working at McK, Bain, or BCG. This number struck you as absurdly high for a class so small in size. In addition, the average starting salary from MBS was comparable to the non-IB feeder business schools located in the US, and you knew that Melbourne cost of living was significantly less than the cost of living in most metropolitan centers in the US. And you definitely wanted to stay in Asia, and attending school here would easily let you do that.

What you did not realize at the time, though, was that these statistics were vitally influenced by the economic climate, and you now believe that this year's graduating class may significantly worse than last year's simply as a result of the world economy. In particular, the graduating class of 2009 found consulting hit hard... just like it was at every other b-school in the world. Also, you did not realize just how different the MBS experience was from the US B-school experience, and how the MBA is valued differently in Oz than in the States. But that is a discussion for a later post.

All things considered, you realized it would be fun and professionally rewarding to spend a significant amount of time in Oz. And you decided to write a blog about it. So far, both these decisions have been good ones.

^_^

*A few members of your intake were a little different... but this is still the exception, not the rule.