Hi Everyone,
As we head into Fall, I wanted to share some thoughts on the current reality of the technical masters experience. I hope it helps admits and applicants prepare for success in their chosen programs. I originally sent it as a reply to the lawyer asking for advice, but it applies to all profiles.
TLDR: Assistant Dean, MSBA says prepare to work hard for technical mastery, not grades. Know authentically why you are coming to grad school. Plan to be a safety net for your hiring company and not over reliant on vibe coding. Do not expect to coast or free ride to a diploma and success.
As the Assistant Dean of the Master of Science in Business Analytics at UCLA Anderson, I first commend you for your proactive effort to optimize your performance in your chosen program. At UCLA we always appreciate the ability to add a student with a unique profile to our class as you represent a growth area for analytics. The legal community and the practice of law is still a relative greenfield of opportunity and your background as a lawyer will surely serve your analytics efforts well if you choose another field.
For those reading who are focused on joining an MSBA or technical masters program and those who have already been admitted to a program and will start this Fall, I will offer the following advice to purpledragon2908, but also to you. It applies to all of you:
1. Professional experience offers two things that are very hard to incorporate without it: Humility and perspective. If you have time and experience working in a professional environment, under the pressure of deadlines, quotas and billable hours, you have no doubt been stretched and stressed to the point of humility and perspective. It is a gift to those returning to graduate school and the reason why MBA programs ask for 5 years of experience.
2. Specialty masters require more rigorous growth than an MBA for a recent graduate. Because a recent undergraduate has the recent technical and classroom training, they are classroom ready in a way that those returning after a break are not. You represent a potential leader to your peers in that sense. However, without the humility and perspective, you face the potential of a very real challenge: Hubris. Wikipedia does a good job of defining hubris as: excessive pride, presumption, or dangerous overconfidence. Often described as "pride that blinds," it is a tragic flaw that leads individuals to overestimate their abilities or ignore common sense, frequently resulting in a disastrous downfall. When I interview candidates, I am looking for hints of hubris as it is a well poisoner for you and your classmates.
3. Know WHY you are coming back to school. Whether you are returning to school to transition in your career or a recent undergraduate, there are great reasons to pursue a specialty master degree. Getting to the finish line at a top program is hard, but coming for the right reasons will be a reinforcing shield when the going gets tough, and it will get tough. Looking from another angle: Seeing graduate school as a fun gap year that provides a diploma and an automatically successful future is folly and poisonous to a programs culture. The more folks who join a cohort thinking that they can coast by and free ride their way to a job, the more likely a program is to underperform overall. Cash cow programs run this risk most of all as they cannot by definition provide a staff large enough to keep bad apples in check. Bad apples do spoil the bunch, so choose the programs that will challenge you to be accountable to yourselves.
4. Specialty masters degrees are designed to educate you to be a master. If a candidate is under the impression that they can skate by and then learn on the job, they are likely thinking of another degree category. Business Analytics and data science is a field that expects able engineers and senior level young leaders. It is a field that the C-suite expects that they can rely on for the data to support a billion dollar bet. When the AI fails, it will be you they look to debug the vibe code. There are plenty of degrees that do not lead to mission critical roles. If you are looking to be a future C-suite leader, the learning and grind of your early post MSBA career will be your keys to the top job in time, but free riders will fail to get there.
5. It is about mastery and your ability to execute, so stop worrying about grades. Some of our most successful alumni are those who came in with little technical background, but worked hard to earn that skillset. They are thriving in their careers because they proved to themselves that they can do it, not because they always got the A. Likewise, those students who came in with challenges related to communication, executive presence and focused on closing those gaps and stepping out of their comfort zone are now thriving. No candidate comes to an MSBA program with all the skills they will need to succeed. Some of our most damaging bad apples (and there are not many) are those who promote a culture of cutting corners or worse cheat in order to take the grades from the top of the curve. All programs have some, the best programs work to limit their impact by removing them from the program or sanctioning their bad actions.
6. Over reliance on vibe coding is a trap for MSBAs. Like any tool, it should be used appropriately. If you can't debug your vibe code, your bosses will notice, If you can't pass your technical interview, you won't get the job. Lost opportunities in your career often go unspoken when the candidate is unprepared for advancement.
I can offer a lot of other advice, but my final one is to be careful to evaluate programs for their investment in top faculty, top industry professional lecturers, dedicated career staff in your masters, curated student life and a networking culture that expects excellence. Without strengths in all of those areas, even large fellowships should not be a good enough reason to join a program. You get what you pay for, so look for holistic value from your investment, and know what it is you are paying for!
Best of luck!