The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - April 25, 2024


The Value of Pursuing an MBA Degree (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_662)


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Length

40 minutes

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149.3266

Word count

6,087

Sentence count

330

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

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Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about why pursuing an MBA is a good idea and why it's worth doing so. I talk a bit about my own background and why I think an MBA could be a great career choice for many people.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 But today what I thought I would do, and maybe I wish I would have announced this earlier, spend a bit of time talking about what is the value of pursuing an MBA.
00:00:11.980 As many of you know, my career has been spent housed in a business school. Those of you who follow my academic work know that I apply evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology to study human behavior in general and consumer and economic behavior in particular.
00:00:36.760 So that's why I'm housed in a business school. So some of the courses that I teach include things like consumer behavior at the undergraduate level, consumer behavior at the MBA level.
00:00:48.860 I've taught consumer psychology and psychology of decision making at the master's of science and PhD level.
00:00:56.160 So for the past few years, I've taught an understanding our consuming instinct course at the undergraduate level, which is a course where I demonstrate how you apply evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior.
00:01:09.820 Then I've also, so this has been at my university, Concordia University, but I've also been a visiting professor at several major American universities at UC Irvine, at Dartmouth College, so the Tuck School of Business, and also at Cornell, my alma mater, the Johnson School, Johnson Graduate School of Management.
00:01:33.660 And there, I've also taught consumer behavior, and there I've also taught consumer behavior, I've taught marketing research, and at UC Irvine, I've also taught international marketing, which was the only time that I ever taught this course.
00:01:45.760 This was back at, when I was a visiting professor for two years at UC Irvine.
00:01:51.020 Next year, actually, I'll be teaching some new courses that I've never taught before. I'll have more to say about that in a while.
00:01:58.640 So that gives you a bit of a sense of my background in terms of being housed in a business school.
00:02:05.620 But then the next question is, well, did I pursue an MBA? And so this leads us to the question of, is it, you know, is an MBA worth doing?
00:02:14.480 And of course, as someone who loves education, who believes that all other things equal, more education is always better than less education, if pursued properly and under the right conditions, then of course an MBA could be extremely valuable.
00:02:32.260 And now I'm not talking about extrinsic value in the sense of, oh, you know, if you have MBA after your name, you're more likely to get that promotion.
00:02:41.720 That's really not what I want to spend my time talking about. I'm talking more about the purity of the process.
00:02:48.960 Is there intrinsic value? Are there intrinsic rewards in pursuing an MBA?
00:02:53.300 And notwithstanding the fact that many students regrettably pursue an MBA only because it's a means to an end, the original vision of an MBA was that, you know, you'd have people who were technically trained.
00:03:09.700 Imagine you're an engineer who, okay, you've spent quite a few years doing, you know, technical work as an engineer out of your undergrad engineering, but now you want to move on to a more managerial role.
00:03:24.000 So, you work at Boeing and you now want to no longer be the one who is doing the calculations and, you know, aerodynamics, but you now want to be leading a team of 60 engineers that involves all sorts of business decisions.
00:03:42.640 Well, then you would go off and do an MBA and there'd be great value in that because in your technical training, you wouldn't have seen all the types of courses that, you know, you expect to know from a business school perspective.
00:03:58.400 So, in my case, for example, I did an undergrad in mathematics and computer science and so I was the ideal guy to then go ahead and pursue an MBA.
00:04:09.040 Okay. Now, there is a bit, well, a lot less added value in doing an MBA if you already have an undergraduate in business.
00:04:21.280 So, originally, in many cases, it was, as I said, you have a technical background and then you go and you do, you go to graduate school, you go to business school in the same way that you go to other professional schools, you go to medical school, you go to law school.
00:04:34.240 And that was really the idea was, it was graduate training. So, many of the most prestigious business schools don't have undergraduate programs in business. It's meant to be MBA or higher.
00:04:46.860 But then, of course, you know, undergraduate MBA degrees started developing and that's perfectly fine.
00:04:53.540 You know, you can have a very good undergraduate degree in business.
00:04:57.600 But then the question becomes, how much added value do you get if you do an MBA after an undergraduate degree?
00:05:03.260 Well, you can. If, let's say, in your undergrad, you specialize very much in finance and economics and then in your MBA, you want to specialize in marketing.
00:05:11.740 Well, then there might be value. But all things told, the most bang for your buck you're going to get with an MBA is if you pursue it after a technical degree.
00:05:24.080 Now, in most cases, the typical profile of an MBA student is someone who has been, you know, out of undergrad four or five years.
00:05:35.700 So, typically, I mean, of course, it's not a steadfast rule, but your typical MBA student might be in their late 20s, maybe early 30s.
00:05:46.100 Whereas, for example, in my case, I went straight. I was one of the only, maybe, maybe even the only student in my MBA class to get in straight out of my undergrad.
00:05:56.720 So, I had, I didn't take a break after my undergrad. I went straight for my MBA.
00:06:00.580 Okay. So, that's the first general issue. Yes, MBA can be great, especially if you're coming from a technical background.
00:06:09.920 Number two, as in most things in life, you know, you really get out of the experience what you put into it.
00:06:16.720 So, if you pursue an MBA and you take largely soft classes, you know, how to love your employee, you know, and so on.
00:06:29.480 Well, that's nice. It's all nice and good, but you really want to use your time in school to be learning the knowledge that you otherwise are unlikely to pick up, you know, week one in your workforce, right?
00:06:46.340 So, that's why I always tell my students, try as much as you can to take quantitative courses, right?
00:06:55.180 So, if you're thinking, for example, of doing a marketing degree, in marketing, there are courses that are, you know, less quantitative and more quantitative.
00:07:08.380 Not to imply that non-quantitative course is not important, right?
00:07:12.140 I mean, I teach consumer psychology, which is, you know, involves studying, you know, how do we develop persuasive messages, let's say, in an advertisement?
00:07:20.660 What are the types of, you know, decision rules that consumers use?
00:07:25.240 So, it's very much rooted in cognitive psychology and social psychology and, in my case, evolutionary psychology.
00:07:31.660 But, it's also very good to take quantitative courses.
00:07:36.220 So, for example, you're taking big data analytics.
00:07:39.340 Now, today, of course, with AI, you have, you know, you can have AI applications in business settings, right?
00:07:46.640 Or, in my case, for example, in my MBA degree, I did a mini thesis, a six-credit thesis in operations research, which is an applied mathematics field.
00:07:56.900 I studied a problem called the two-dimensional cutting stock problem, which is a problem that arises in many industries where you have, say, in the wood industry, the metal industry, in the glass industry, where you have this raw resource, let's say, sheets of metal or sheets of wood or sheets of glass.
00:08:19.860 And, you get an order from a client, I'd like 70 X by X squares to be cut, and I need 30 A by B rectangles to be cut.
00:08:33.540 And then, the question becomes, how do you lay out those cuts for a given client's order as to minimize the waste of the raw material?
00:08:45.160 It's a very, very important problem that has huge bottom-line implications, right?
00:08:51.240 Because if you don't lay the guillotine cuts properly, then you end up losing a lot of money, unless you're able to somehow salvage the wasted resource.
00:09:02.100 And so, that was a problem that I had studied for a few years as a research assistant, and I ended up writing up a thesis on that.
00:09:09.760 So, even though I was doing an MBA, given that I had a mathematics, computer science background, I still took hard courses.
00:09:18.020 I don't mean hard in that they're difficult, although they were, but I took hard quantitative courses.
00:09:23.360 I took a quantitative marketing course.
00:09:25.420 But, you know, even the first-year courses that all MBA students take, financial accounting and managerial accounting and finance and microeconomics and macroeconomics, organizational behavior, all these courses, they're really, they're indispensable, you know, to truly understand the totality of how business works.
00:09:46.760 And so, there's definitely great intrinsic value in pursuing an MBA.
00:09:51.840 But then again, here's where I'm going to get a bit critical, because a lot of MBA programs have become astoundingly watered-down programs.
00:10:04.560 And I've talked about this on many occasions.
00:10:06.660 I even had written a highly popular Psychology Today article many years ago, where I basically said, I can't remember the exact title of the article, but it was something like, I'll have a hamburgers, fries, hold the pickles, and an MBA.
00:10:21.980 And there, what I was saying facetiously is that if you look at the requirements for completing an MBA in terms of the number of credits you have to complete at the time when I did the MBA.
00:10:34.120 So, I did my MBA from 88 to 90.
00:10:37.040 I graduated with my MBA in 1990.
00:10:39.480 And if you look at many MBA programs today, the programs are, in many cases, at least one-third fewer credits.
00:10:47.820 I think in my case, if I'm going on memory here, I think I had to do 67 credits, which is incredibly heavy load.
00:10:55.700 It's two full years of five, six, seven graduate courses a semester, right?
00:11:03.300 I mean, many people can't handle taking four graduate courses in one semester.
00:11:07.920 And these are really heavy courses, managerial accounting and finance and microeconomics and macroeconomics and so on.
00:11:14.980 And now, you know, come do MBA with us.
00:11:21.460 It'll only take you 12 months.
00:11:23.240 Okay, well, we've got even an accelerated MBA.
00:11:25.800 It's 10 months.
00:11:26.840 Come do the MBA with us.
00:11:28.320 It's six weekends.
00:11:29.680 Come do the MBA with us.
00:11:31.240 It's just a drive-through and you can get a burger at the same time.
00:11:34.900 Okay, it's too much for you to do a drive-by.
00:11:37.920 Just get a car wash. 0.99
00:11:40.400 And if your car wash meets your satisfaction, you also pick up an MBA.
00:11:45.300 And now, of course, the argument there is always, well, you know, people are busy and they don't have time anymore to spend so many years.
00:11:52.140 And so you respond to market conditions. 0.99
00:11:55.820 Bullshit, right? 0.99
00:11:57.480 That's what it means to have intrinsic value. 0.99
00:12:00.580 You don't water down the academic requirements of a degree because you have to respond to market conditions.
00:12:09.160 It's just a death spiral to the bottom.
00:12:12.080 It's a race to the bottom.
00:12:13.200 So universities have this desperate need to attract students.
00:12:17.660 And so one of the ways that they do that is they keep watering down the amount of credits you have to complete in order.
00:12:23.060 So now you have executive MBA.
00:12:24.600 Well, you don't have to really come to school.
00:12:26.380 Just every eighth weekend, you have a one-day retreat.
00:12:30.240 And that 24 hours of spending together, you know, counts as a semester.
00:12:36.600 And so, you know, just get together three times, play golf, and you have an executive MBA degree.
00:12:41.620 No, no, no, no, no.
00:12:43.000 No, it shouldn't be that what is required to complete an MBA changes within one or two generations and changes drastically, right?
00:12:51.840 It's not they've taken out this course and replaced it by that course.
00:12:55.960 I mean, by the way, this is also happening in medicine.
00:12:58.140 Historically, medicine was always a four-year degree, MD degree, and now some schools are reducing it to three years, accelerated.
00:13:06.500 Okay, so yes, intrinsically, you can pursue an MBA.
00:13:12.840 It can give you great value if you choose the right courses.
00:13:17.780 You can certainly learn a lot.
00:13:19.700 So I want to maybe take a minute or two telling you about some of the incredible courses that I took in my electives, right?
00:13:28.240 So as you might imagine, in the first year of the MBA, a real MBA, a two-year full-time MBA, you know, you're taking a lot of the core courses that everyone takes.
00:13:41.400 And then in your second year, you end up specializing in different courses depending on your interest.
00:13:46.800 One of the courses that till today remains, you know, one of the courses that I found most personally enriching was a course called Group Dynamics, which I took with Professor Jay Conger, who had also been my professor in the first year of the MBA.
00:14:10.240 He taught the core organizational behavior course.
00:14:13.880 And Jay and I subsequently became friends.
00:14:16.160 He's now, after he left McGill, he went to one of the seven sister colleges, McKenna something in L.A.
00:14:25.280 And so we've stayed in touch, and he's a wonderful guy.
00:14:29.000 His main area of research is on leadership and whether leaders are made or whether they're born, right?
00:14:39.000 So it's the old nature-nurture debate when it comes to leadership.
00:14:42.500 So Jay was a great professor.
00:14:44.520 But in the second year of the MBA, he taught a course called Group Dynamics, which was one of the most sought-after courses.
00:14:53.260 Everybody wanted to take that course.
00:14:55.460 But you had to go through a rigorous application process because he only picked, I think if memory serves me right, either five or six students in a class.
00:15:08.820 And those people would become the group that would effectively go through a whole group therapy session throughout the semester with, of course, Jay serving as the director, the orchestrator of the group dynamics.
00:15:25.960 And it's a course where, I mean, as the term says, I mean, it's learning about group dynamics, but learning about yourself.
00:15:33.460 So I remember very vividly to, and I actually talk about this in the parasitic mind briefly.
00:15:45.700 If I remember, I can't remember, I think it was in chapter one, where I'm talking about the idea that, so there's something called transactional analysis from psychoanalysis.
00:15:58.900 I think it's Eric Byrne, I think it's Eric Byrne, I'm really going here on references from many, many years ago, where he basically argued, so scripts that people play, the idea being that the lives that we lead are akin in part to how an actor is given a script, right?
00:16:20.560 Here's the script that you're going to play in your character as the Bond villain.
00:16:25.760 And so the idea then becomes that scripts that people play in transactional analysis is that the idea that, for example, you might be given a script from your parents that says, you are the great hope of the family.
00:16:39.600 We expect you to become a physician or an engineer, and you're the great hope out of the misery that we've had.
00:16:47.240 You're going to be the first person to graduate from university.
00:16:51.040 So, of course, there's an element that's just your nature, your innate forces, but there's this other nurture element whereby you're handed a script that might shape the types of decisions that you make in your life.
00:17:06.880 And so as we went through that course, which, as I said, is effectively this really very deep and profound group therapy session, we had to write a paper as part of our final requirements for that course, where we shared what are the key scripts that define our life's trajectory, right?
00:17:29.720 And so if you remember, those of you who read The Parasitic Mind, I talked about that two of the innate ideals that shape my personhood as I tackle life are truth and freedom.
00:17:39.180 So it's in that context that I mentioned that course.
00:17:42.300 The other assignment that we had to do in that group dynamics course was, I think the gentleman's name was Don Rizzo, if I'm not mistaken.
00:17:55.720 He had this theory about various personality types and offshoots of these personality types.
00:18:02.560 And so you had to read that book and then explain what was your personality type, what were the offshoots.
00:18:11.860 I can't remember what the term in the book was, maybe the tangents or the off, I can't remember the term.
00:18:16.840 I think the guy's name is Don Rizzo.
00:18:18.640 Again, I'm going here on memory from 35 years ago.
00:18:23.560 So, yes, I was a very, very good student.
00:18:28.780 And then not only you had to tell in the paper what your personality type was based on that taxonomy,
00:18:36.940 but you then had to predict what all the other members of your group's personality types were
00:18:46.900 by virtue of you having been in this very intimate group dynamics, group therapy course for the entire MBA semester.
00:18:56.020 And then the question becomes, is that, you know, was there convergent validity?
00:19:02.220 In other words, did everybody within the group predict that Gad Saad had exactly that personality type?
00:19:08.740 Or was there a discordant, you know, view across people and so on?
00:19:13.780 So, it was an incredibly powerful exercise.
00:19:18.500 And again, this is something that I took, you know, in my MBA, which was very, very psychological,
00:19:24.640 very profound, very psychoanalytic.
00:19:28.140 You know, we were sworn to secrecy akin to how a therapist and a client or a patient would have to face.
00:19:39.240 And of course, I've never discussed any of the details or any of the people before and so on.
00:19:42.620 And I wouldn't.
00:19:44.220 But it was so, so powerful.
00:19:46.040 I mean, people would break down.
00:19:48.220 You know, you, I mean, everything that you might expect in a group therapy session.
00:19:52.060 And that happened within the context of an MBA degree.
00:19:56.120 I did another course with a professor whom I got to know later on a personal level as a friend,
00:20:03.340 Amitava Chattopadeh, who taught a course called Marketing Communications, where we ended up doing a research project.
00:20:09.940 I remember.
00:20:10.440 I mean, I wish some of my former professors would be listening now to appreciate that I'm recounting these stories nearly four decades after they took place.
00:20:20.960 And so I remember in my marketing communications course, we had to do a final project where we wanted to understand what are the reasons why people might not sign an organ donor card if they were to,
00:20:40.200 for example, tragically pass away in an accident, right?
00:20:44.620 If they were, if they were to, if they were to, you know, to die, what would be the reasons why you wouldn't do that?
00:20:53.960 Given that, you know, you can benefit other people, you can, you know, your, your, your tragic death might cause many other people to survive.
00:21:03.240 And the idea was, of course, that by understanding what are the obstacles that stops people from signing those donor cards,
00:21:10.500 then you can develop persuasion messages that cater to these.
00:21:15.520 And so that was an incredible project, right?
00:21:17.500 I mean, it was, it was certainly social marketing.
00:21:20.000 It was health marketing.
00:21:21.120 You had to study how to collect data, how to design instruments to understand people's motives, or in this case, their reticence to do something.
00:21:30.700 How do you then develop a, a message that tries to persuade them otherwise?
00:21:35.800 So again, a, I'll mention in a second, one other course, although I could spend another five hours talking about, you know, all these amazing courses that I've taken.
00:21:44.560 Uh, but my point here is that the reason why I, I mean, yes, I, I was a unique student and that I was, you know, very academically oriented.
00:21:54.600 I knew that I was going to become a professor.
00:21:56.780 So I was very, very intrinsically motivated, but the fact that I am able just on a, on a whim, you know, recount these stories.
00:22:05.740 It's not like I went into the, into an archive and I generated these stories.
00:22:09.840 I'm just whipping these out from my memory.
00:22:12.440 Well, shows how, you know, important those experiences, those learning experiences were to me. 0.96
00:22:18.520 So if you pursue an MBA, because you just want to scam it, you want to do a, you know, a 30 minute MBA at some bullshit school. 0.64
00:22:27.220 So that you can get your, your, the title MBA after your name.
00:22:31.700 Well, then probably this conversation is not for you, but if you're someone serious, then there is no reason to think that an MBA is, is just some, you know, professional designation.
00:22:41.680 You could really, there are some incredibly deep, technical, powerful courses that you could take.
00:22:48.240 I'll mention one other quick story during my MBA, and then maybe I'll just, you know, talk about what types of schools you can go to and so on.
00:22:57.920 And then, you know, we can call it a day.
00:22:59.640 By the way, if you, I see that there are some, a few requests.
00:23:03.840 I don't take questions here in the open session.
00:23:07.540 If you do wish to ask me questions as relating to this session, you can subscribe to my exclusive content.
00:23:13.380 And there is a thread where you can post your question, and then I will go there until 9.15 tonight.
00:23:20.400 If you get your question before then, I will write my response, individualized to you.
00:23:26.140 So apologies, but I'm not taking any questions here.
00:23:30.060 So I had taken a managerial negotiations course.
00:23:32.860 I'm not sure how many, I'm not even sure if I've ever mentioned this publicly.
00:23:37.820 And if I haven't, boy, you're getting first dibs on it.
00:23:41.620 So I was taking a managerial negotiations course, and I'll even tell you the professor's name.
00:23:47.360 And I swear to God, to the cosmos, that I'm not looking up my former transcripts.
00:23:53.820 I'm not looking, it's straight from memory.
00:23:55.520 His name was David Saunders.
00:23:57.820 He went on.
00:23:59.880 I'd like to think that he'd be very happy to know that I remember his name 35 years later.
00:24:05.640 So first day, I walk into this managerial negotiations course, and we had this class-wide negotiations exercise to do where, you know, you had to, the whole class had to go through these negotiations.
00:24:24.440 And then at the end of it, they'd be, you know, a winner, a singular winner of the entire exercise.
00:24:32.000 So the first week, yours truly, Dr. Goodlooks wins the negotiations exercise.
00:24:40.080 Week two, different exercise, but same principle.
00:24:44.040 Dr. Goodlooks wins the, you know, the exercise of that day.
00:24:50.860 So the professor comes up to me very gingerly, maybe even back then it would have been triggering to ask about someone's background, although it wasn't nearly as bad as it is today.
00:25:07.320 He approached me, he goes, do you mind if I ask what your background is?
00:25:12.280 I said, oh, what do you mean, professor, like my academic background?
00:25:17.300 Oh, I studied before my MBA, mathematics and computer science.
00:25:21.940 He goes, no, no, no, no, I don't mean your academic background.
00:25:23.880 What's your, what's your ethnic background?
00:25:26.100 You know, I mean, I guess you could tell that I'm not original, I'm not John Smith or whatever, indigenous person or whatever.
00:25:35.040 I said, oh, my, my background, I'm, we're Lebanese.
00:25:38.520 Actually, I'm Lebanese Jewish.
00:25:40.040 He goes, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you're Lebanese and you're Jewish and you're in a negotiations class.
00:25:48.840 What is it that I can teach you?
00:25:51.060 Of course, we both laughed.
00:25:52.440 It was funny.
00:25:53.140 Now, of course, today that would be, he'd be fired for having promulgated a stereotype about the negotiating mercantile Phoenician Lebanese guy.
00:26:04.580 But the point was that, yeah, maybe it's in my blood that, you know, we know how to, you know, negotiate well.
00:26:13.500 So, to summarize all this, MBA can be an amazing experience.
00:26:19.620 It could be an interesting experience, especially, as I said, if you're coming from a technical background.
00:26:25.220 If you take the right courses, it could be incredibly rewarding if you do the real MBA, full MBA, not some watered down, you know, 5% version of a real MBA.
00:26:36.800 Now, in terms of which schools to go to, look here, it's, I mean, the answer here is one that's more extrinsically related in that, yes, if you get an MBA from MIT or Stanford or Cornell, my alma mater, or Harvard, yes, that opens you up to a lot more interviews from specific types of schools.
00:27:04.140 Many schools, many schools, not schools, companies, post your MBA.
00:27:08.580 The idea being that, just like, for example, law school, it's very, very hard to get certain interviews or, you know, internships with certain law firms in New York if you don't come from one of, you know, six or seven, typically Ivy League law schools.
00:27:24.820 And so, yes, there is a signal there.
00:27:30.480 Now, of course, there are, you know, the top business schools in the world.
00:27:37.660 By the way, actually, the school that I'm at, the John Molson School of Business, is consistently ranked in the top three, four business schools in Canada and in the top, like, 70 or so in the world.
00:27:50.000 So, it's a world-renowned business school.
00:27:53.060 Actually, the business school of my university is more globally renowned than the brand name of my university.
00:28:03.380 So, many people would know McGill University, which is another English school in Montreal.
00:28:10.300 They would know McGill more than they know Concordia.
00:28:12.180 But when it comes to the John Molson School of Business, it's actually, you know, it's punching above its weight cost, as they say.
00:28:21.580 So, which school to go to, it really depends.
00:28:24.740 Of course, there is a question of money.
00:28:28.840 Many of the elite private schools are exorbitantly expensive.
00:28:34.920 That doesn't mean that you can't go to an in-state state call.
00:28:38.720 You know, you could go to Purdue University or Ohio State University.
00:28:43.320 Or if you're in California, you can go to UC Berkeley, which is a state school, a public school.
00:28:48.560 Or you go to University of Michigan, which is also a public school.
00:28:51.820 It's a top, top school.
00:28:53.340 I gave two talks at University of Michigan after my first book came out, The Evolutionary Basis of Consumption.
00:29:00.460 One talk was at the Ross School of Business.
00:29:02.760 The other one was at the psychology department.
00:29:05.760 And, you know, top, top school.
00:29:07.480 So, there are ways by which you could still attend top universities or top business schools, even if you're not super wealthy and that you can go the public route.
00:29:18.560 You know, University of Florida has a good business school.
00:29:20.680 As I said, University of Michigan, UC Berkeley, UCLA.
00:29:26.320 All of these are ultimately public schools versus, say, Duke or MIT or Cornell or University of Chicago.
00:29:33.720 Of course, if you're interested in economics, University of Chicago is historically the place to be.
00:29:40.160 So, you know, it's tough to advise you as to which school to go to.
00:29:44.780 But to kind of conclude, oh, and I'll actually, I want to, before I conclude, I want to mention one other thing.
00:29:51.840 At my own university, in my own school, we actually have, so we have an undergraduate in business.
00:30:00.740 You know, you can specialize in marketing or finance or accounting or supply chain management or management, organizational behavior and so on.
00:30:09.340 Or, so that's undergrad.
00:30:12.800 Then, of course, we have the MBA.
00:30:15.560 We also have a PhD, which typically takes about, I mean, if you're very, very quick, four years, typically takes five.
00:30:25.500 Many times, oftentimes takes longer.
00:30:27.620 This is full time, of course.
00:30:28.700 Most PhDs go on for academic positions, of course.
00:30:34.680 But the reason I'm mentioning all this is because at the master's level, we have something quite unique at my school, which a few other schools have.
00:30:42.240 A growing number of schools are now doing.
00:30:44.480 We have an MSC.
00:30:46.140 I mean, in the American context, you would just call it MS, Masters of Science.
00:30:50.800 In Canada, we follow the British system.
00:30:53.500 We add the C, MSC for Masters of Science.
00:30:57.040 The Masters of Science is actually quite different from the MBA.
00:31:02.460 The MBA is a generalist degree.
00:31:05.160 So, you know, it's like going to medical school or going to law school.
00:31:09.160 You know, you've got your two years.
00:31:10.940 You take your whole bunch of courses.
00:31:13.940 It's just basically typically courses.
00:31:16.340 You know, you pass those courses and you go on to the next courses.
00:31:19.020 The MSC is like a thesis-based program.
00:31:23.900 Like you would have in other, you know, MAs or MS programs.
00:31:29.060 You take typically one year of coursework.
00:31:32.200 And these are usually much more research seminars.
00:31:35.080 So, you're actually, as part of the required readings of the courses, you're actually reading scientific academic papers.
00:31:43.780 And then you have to do a thesis, a full-blown master's thesis with a supervisor.
00:31:50.700 So, it's smaller in scope than, of course, a doctoral dissertation, but it's a full thesis.
00:31:58.280 So, I've supervised, you know, several master's theses.
00:32:03.740 And some of those works, you know, I place the quality bar very high.
00:32:10.160 And so, some of those works have subsequently led to publications and top journals with the student that I supervised in various top journals.
00:32:22.620 And so, the benefit of doing an MSC are multiple-fold.
00:32:29.820 Multifold.
00:32:30.420 Number one, remember earlier I was saying that, for example, if you already have an undergrad, you may not want to do an MBA.
00:32:36.620 Well, an undergrad in business, I mean.
00:32:39.440 Well, one of the things that the MSC allows you to do is if you want to avoid having another generalist degree, the MSC grants you a specialization in premature.
00:32:50.440 Because you are specializing by virtue of you doing a thesis, by definition, in a very specialized and narrow topic.
00:33:00.240 So, let's suppose you're interested in international advertising.
00:33:05.200 Okay.
00:33:06.060 So, that way, when you finish your MSC, it's not as though you might go into investment banking or McKinsey Consulting or like you really, your passion is you want to be a marketing researcher within, you know, a global international marketing context.
00:33:23.480 Well, maybe you're going to do a thesis on some international marketing topic.
00:33:28.900 You might study, do fear-based appeals, meaning advertisements that use fear as part of their, the copy of the ad, do they, are they as effective across cultural settings?
00:33:45.560 I just made that up, okay?
00:33:46.680 Well, that might become a thesis topic and then you'll end up, you know, proposing a set of hypotheses, designing the data collection instruments, collecting the data, conducting a literature review, analyzing the data, arriving at conclusions.
00:34:01.040 Very much what you do when you publish an academic paper, scientific paper.
00:34:05.760 So, the beauty of doing an MSC is if you think that you'd like to have a specialization orientation prior to going out into the job market after completing a graduate degree in business, then the MSC becomes really attractive.
00:34:24.800 And now, there aren't as many MSC programs in business schools as there are, of course, MBA programs, but they're growing in number.
00:34:34.260 And so, that might be, for some of you, a very attractive option rather than the more generalist MBA.
00:34:41.000 So, to conclude, yes, an MBA could be very rewarding, independently of the fact that, yes, you might get a salary bump, it could be a very rewarding intellectual experience if you choose the right program, if you take the right courses, it could be very enriching and intellectually challenging.
00:35:03.740 Which school you go to, of course, depends on a whole range of issues, but, you know, of course, depending on how much, what your, you know, budget is, what, you know, how good your background is, your grades are.
00:35:20.500 Many of these programs are very, very competitive to get into.
00:35:23.100 It's not very easy to get into many of these top business schools.
00:35:27.400 Yeah, so that's it.
00:35:28.840 I hope I've answered some of your lingering questions about the value of an MBA.
00:35:37.760 From my perspective, from the perspective of the professor, there are good aspects in teaching MBA students and, regrettably, some less than good ones.
00:35:51.480 The good part is that, of course, the students are a lot more mature.
00:35:55.300 However, they usually have a lot more experience in that they've been out there in the workforce for, as I said, four, five, six years.
00:36:06.020 That's great.
00:36:07.760 Given that they're doing an MBA, and, you know, given that it's quite selective to get into good business schools, you know, you expect them, on average, to be quite studious, quite intelligent, quite hardworking.
00:36:19.160 The difficulty with the MBAs, and that's only gotten worse with the growing sense of entitlement, is that it's often difficult to deal with MBAs because they truly have internalized the customer is king ethos.
00:36:35.120 And that doesn't work well with Dr. Goodlooks, right?
00:36:38.020 No, I will not design different schedules for the exam to suit each of your travel schedules.
00:36:48.400 There's this thing called the course outline.
00:36:50.840 That course outline stipulates exactly when we're meeting.
00:36:54.060 You decide if it coincides or conflicts with your work schedule.
00:36:58.740 If it does, then you end up not taking the course.
00:37:01.400 You know what that's called?
00:37:02.700 It's called life.
00:37:03.640 So, no, I will not be providing seven different time periods for you to take your exam.
00:37:12.080 No, I will not fudge the grades because otherwise, if you don't have a 3.7, Procter & Gamble won't be interviewing you.
00:37:20.600 And so, there isn't a magic way by which, wink, wink, I'm going to add grades to your final grade.
00:37:26.400 So, there is a bit of that because a lot of the students, regrettably, end up being extrinsically motivated.
00:37:34.480 And I'm the king of intrinsic motivation.
00:37:37.260 And so, sometimes that can cause a bit of friction.
00:37:39.980 But luckily, very early in the course, I kind of, well, not I kind of, I do set the guidelines and expectations.
00:37:47.280 And so, that the ones who end up staying in my course, you know, end up seeing eye to eye in terms of what they want to get out of the course.
00:37:55.200 There you have it, folks.
00:37:56.340 If any of you are ever interested in taking a course with me, it's never too late to apply to pursue an MBA.
00:38:05.700 Okay, I'll just, I keep saying I'm going to end here.
00:38:08.980 But let me just mention that in my latest book, which, by the way, is coming out on paperback on May 14th.
00:38:17.720 It's called The Sad Truth About Happiness, Eight Secrets for Leading the Good Life.
00:38:22.440 And towards the end of the book, I describe two stories, two incredible stories of people who ended up completing their PhDs in their late 80s and early 90s.
00:38:40.500 And so, imagine, excuse me, when I get a student who comes into my office and says,
00:38:45.400 Hey, Professor, can I talk to you?
00:38:47.060 I need some advice.
00:38:47.820 I say, yeah, sure, come in.
00:38:48.580 And, well, Professor, you know, I'm 27 and I'm thinking that maybe I'm too old to pursue, you know, fill in the blank, whatever degree.
00:38:57.580 Then I tell them, sit down.
00:38:59.400 I have a story to tell you.
00:39:00.620 And then I usually proceed to tell them one, if not both of those stories.
00:39:05.380 And suddenly, them being 27 or 29 or 32 or 34 is not that old compared to someone who decided to go back to study in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
00:39:18.080 So, luckily, education is one area where we can pursue, assuming, God willing, we're healthy of mind and body late into our lives.
00:39:30.400 And so, yes, you can pursue degrees.
00:39:33.080 So, I hope that I'll see some of you in some lecture at some point.
00:39:37.380 If you're ever in Montreal and want to maybe audit a course, shoot me an email.
00:39:42.340 It's happened in the past.
00:39:43.120 I've actually had fans who just wrote to me and said, Hey, I'm going to be in Montreal.
00:39:47.400 Are you teaching anything this semester?
00:39:49.420 And then they come and they sit in on a class.
00:39:52.700 So, thank you so much for attending today's session.
00:39:56.840 I promise to try to be a bit more routinized and offer some schedule for people to be able to, you know, work these sessions into their schedule.
00:40:11.680 And until next time, cheers, everybody.
00:40:14.480 And thank you for coming.
00:40:15.540 Take care.
00:40:15.800 Take care.