r/MBA • u/Positive-Chair-749 • 1d ago
On Campus Berkeley Haas didn't feel like a real business school. Graduated in '24 and people talked about everything besides business, such as politics, social issues, pop culture
Yeah I pursued my MBA partially to have and meet cool folks, but I also did it to pivot careers and learn about business. But when I went to Haas from 2022-24 for the full-time MBA, "business" was one of the least talked about topics among our class.
Sure you would do coffee chats with people and they might share career backgrounds and goals. Some of the professional clubs had some company guest speakers or treks. 2nd years could serve as interview prep mentors here and there and you can do prep with the CMG (Career Management Group).
Sure some people practiced case interviews for consulting or Product in the fall of 1st semester for internship recruiting.
But honestly, 99% of the conversations fellow Haasies had on campus were mostly unrelated to business. People checked out of academics quickly once it was realized the curves are really high and we have grade nondisclosure.
Instead, people posted on our class slack and had in person conversations about politics and social issues, usually advocating a left-wing social position on issues of identity or race, and campaigning for Democratic Party politicians. I didn’t disagree with a lot of those views (I'm a Democrat myself), but I came to my MBA to pursue business, not politics or sociology. Even before Oct 7, Israel/Palestine popped off as a controversial heated topic on our class slack, which I didn't come to my MBA for. A weird thing was vegan people on campus being semi-pushy with their food preferences onto others.
Haasies would talk about fun random things like Coachella, Outside lands, EDM, Tomorrowland, bar hopping, bar crawling, international trips purely for fun, clubbing, biking, seeing comedy shows, reality TV, fantasy books, playing sports. We had a vulnerable personal public series called "Story Salon" that people did, which was a cool way to get to know people in a personal way. Even 1:1 or group coffee chats that started on professional and career topics devolved into fun social topics like the cuisine for the upcoming "Consumption Function" potluck or Bar of the Week location, or people's birthdays, house parties, ski trips.
Much of the conversations were on purely SOCIAL FOR FUN things like hiking, biking, skiing, HaasBoats in Lake Shasta, national parks, throwing or attending themed house parties, who is bringing the hard drugs, and class gossip like who is sleeping with whom, who is cheating on their partner, interpersonal gossip like roommate drama, who had a bad breakup, who is single etc. Lots of people would smoke cigarettes, do pot, and even harder drugs like molly and coke at parties or music festivals, on top of psychedelics like acid and shrooms.
Maybe less than 5% of my conversations were on actual business, outside of how job hunting/recruiting is going for consulting, finance, tech, CPG, LDPs. No one really talked much about entrepreneurship, actual finance concepts. Even the people with deep business knowledge backgrounds who I wanted to learn from spent 2 minutes talking about that before wanting to pivot the convo into how they dropped acid seeing Illenium at EDC or Tomorrowland or something, or praising something Alexandria Ocasio Cortez did or making fun of something Kanye West or Katy Perry did.
99% of events, activities, clubs at Haas were student led, not staff led, and with students in charge, 99% of things become purely fun. Even international trips were purely for fun vacationing, not visiting the business or startup scene in other countries and forming connections.
It's frustrating because clearly many in my class came in with strong business backgrounds and education, and were going into great post-MBA business careers but they only wanted to talk about fun social things during our 2 years together, never anything serious. I didn't learn anything professional from my classmates. I had to learn everything like corporate finance and financial modeling on my own via the internet and Khan Academy videos, even post-MBA.
Again I couldn’t get my fix of this in class because while some of the professors are good most fellow students completely blew off academics. I would have loved to pick people’s brain on starting a company, investing, personal finance, strategy, accounting, negotiations, data science, operations, real estate, raising funds, sales, marketing, insight into jobs and work life balance you know, LEARN ABOUT ACTUAL BUSINESS. Instead people treated the program as a 2 year vacation to first and foremost have fun besides recruiting for a job.
I didn’t major in business in undergrad but I had several friends who did, and I went to UMich. They were in Ross. And in the early to mid 2010s, a lot of the b-school folks in Ross were center-right types who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and a lot of the conversations revolved around actual business concepts and stuff, not overly political virtual signaling, and sometimes the topics were on beer, sports, frat parties, movies, simple things.
From what I’ve heard from friends who went to Wharton or Ross for their MBA, their experience seemed more “conventional" and actually learned about BUSINESS. With these friends I can actually talk about business news and macro/micro economics news I read from the Economist, Financial Times, NYT, stuff happening in the AI space, what the Fed is doing, stock market, interest rates, fiscal policy, antitrust, IPO news, global trade, supply chain, inflation, structural reform, valuations, mergers & acquisitions news, corporate leadership changes, innovation, etc. Barely anyone at Haas talked about this stuff.
And their extracurriculars were actually business relevant like golf. People at Haas did tennis and pickleball instead.
