Is MBA worth it?

For me it is. I dont consider it a waste of my time or money. It helped me gain a plethora of skills & connections that enable me to be a more productive & resourceful individual and one who is incharge of her own life.

I am a B.Com fresher. I could have waited 2 years and worked as an accountant & content writer to gain experience. I have grown up in a business family and I do believe the context it gave me added more managerial insight than a job at that point.

I wanted to understand the business. From where exactly is money coming from and where is it going? What money is being made? What are the new revenue models that are challenging the market? How are they orienting themselves to their customers? How do they surive the competition?

But thats where my questions ended. MBA helped me move a step forward. What is their organization structure? How do I predict their growth & value their business? How do I identify & quantify the KPI's? What are the various strategies used in the market at an international level? What are the various financial instruments & FOREX risk? How to analyze each & every single item on financial statements to understand the company and its industry? How the money is being raised by a company at large scale? How do companies take decisions to acquire another business? How to develop a structured thinking?

MBA was challenging. It helped me change. I wanted that for myself. MBA is not necessay for it, but for me it was a way to freedom where I am allowed to change myself. It helped me assess my attitude, values & beliefs. And at later stages also my response to stressful events & coping measures. It shifted my personality & mindset to a large extent and opened up a lot of opportunities for me to explore my surroundings.

I come from a conservative family & I dont like to disrupt my surroundings much. I had a sheltered upbringing and found it difficult to take initiative and challenge the status quo. MBA helped me kickstart my growth. I found a voice for myself & confidence to flourish on my own. Ofcourse I could have found it in another career paths too.

It helped me start a journey for myself. I loved doing MBA at an IIM. Diversity of classrooms was challenging. My whole life till then had been within the boundaries of Punjab. I come from a small town & it was tough to adjust and broaden my perspective & thinking. Growing up I had limited myself to confines of library. I had to learn social skills & networking from scratch. (Most challenging aspect of MBA). I made a lot of mistakes too. But there was always someone to point them out & give a ton of valuable advice. I learnt that you just need to reach out and be sincere. Having batchmates from different age groups was a blessing. Every year lived is an experience on its own. In hindsight, I could have done well to observe & learn from their lives a lot.

I am still bad at what I am bad at. Although the amount of it has reduced. And I can clearly identify those activities & qualities. Its a long road ahead. MBA helped me equip myself with a way of thinking that continously challenges itself & try to put everything into a structure & add context to it. I guess that remains to be challenged in my journey for now.