MBA... Fine... But what in MBA!!!

In the initial days, I always questioned myself, "Why not Investment Banking (IB)? Everyone else is thinking of IB! There's huge money in it."

Couldn't convince myself. Because of IB domain, talks of credit derivatives, securities, CFA, FRM are kinda common in my company. And people talk of IB more than they talk of dot NET or java.

But I wanted to do something else. Something which was more inclined towards business. Consulting and General Management came into my mind. Marketing was out of question since childhood. I am not carved out for marketing. With time, I have developed a special inclination for Consulting. One reason was that I had seen it in action. 2 of 3 years of my work ex have gone while working for a Consulting firm's IT shop. I have had a very close feel of the consulting paradigm of work.

By the time I was done with choosing schools, I was pretty much decided that I want to get into Consulting. Next was to decide between IT Consulting and Management Consulting.

Being in a firm which is the right mix of IT consulting, Management Consulting and Investment Banking, I got a chance to observe these fields very closely. IT consulting goes pretty technical. Even I do it besides writing the code. Management Consulting sounds much closer to business.

In Management consulting the options are Strategy and Operations. I did some reading on Wikipedia, Vault's guide and even bought a book on Strategic Consulting. I think its been the career I've been looking for. Very core to business, case driven, and very challenging.

So now I do have an answer to what I want to do (Strategy Consulting) and not what I don't want to do (IB). This is the time I should start writing first draft of my essays.

Few days back I wrote the first draft of Why MBA essay. Thanks to clear admit for an excellent article on the same. Will share my take on the same.