MBA, part-time, Kellogg (ZT)
I'm currently a part-time student in Kellogg and just finished my recruiting
this year, and have some inputs that you guys may find helpful about MBA,
part time, job hunting and Kellogg.
There are couple things important in b-school: the knowledge you learn, the
people you interact with, the career opportunities you have, and the brand
and alumni network you carry on (through your whole life).
I would put the knowledge you learn as the most important thing because in
the short term, it benefits your career search, A LOT (especially for career
changers); in the long term, it benefits your life-long career, simply
because pragmatism is dominant in b-schools – they only teach you practical
stuff. When measuring how much you learned in the school, GPA is
relatively the best tool (there are some exceptions, of course). During the
recruiting, a higher GPA can definitely give you an edge getting an
interview, especially for consulting (BCG, couple years before, only invite
students with higher than 3.75 GPA for close list interviews in Kellogg; on
the other hand, all the consulting firms require you to put GPA and GMAT
scores on application forms – they won’t require that if scores are not
important to them). Once you get the interview, the importance of scores
reduces – whether or not you can receive an offer is 90% based on your
performance during the interview. However, you won’t have an excellent
performance if you didn’t learn well during your previous classes – for
career changers, things you learned in b-school is the single most important
thing you can leverage to convince the interviewer that you can succeed in
the new industry (consulting, I-Banking, or etc.) All that being said, GPA
IS important, especially for career changers who have less experience.
Many people claim that networking is the key in b-schools. To some extent,
it is true; but others, it’s just exaggerated. The majority of your b-
school networking happens between you and your fellow students as well as
the professors. It’s them who give you the most valuable experience that
could benefit your academic achievement, job hunting, future career and even
how to be a better person. That being said, a top school with the culture
you fit well is extremely important: a top school is where all the smart
guys are, and many of them have great personalities, too; as for the culture
, it’s something hard to describe – you need to involve yourself in to
feel it (my feeling with Kellogg is that it’s indeed a supportive and
collegiate environment. Although sometimes teamwork is over-emphasized, it
does cultivate the “Kellogg Way”. Other schools may have culture that fit
you better – you need to find it yourself).
Contrary to many thoughts, networking does not mean being social with other
students – networking without common interests is ineffective and sometimes
just waste of time. Where can you find common interests? The easiest way
is to work together on the course projects and to prepare together for
interviews (such as case prep) – you can easily develop friendship with
your peers through the process. Of course if you are a very social person,
you can find more channels to develop the network. But if you happen to be
a “quiet guy”, developing your network just through regular student life
is also fine.
In the case of networking outside the student and faculty body, one
assumption has to be made: the purpose of your networking is to explore
career opportunities (for other purposes, such as to find your significant
other, I have no idea). The school and student clubs generate 90% of the
networking opportunities for you – in most cases, you will be already
overwhelmed, both time wise and energy wise. For certain kind of career,
such as I-Banking, network is critically important; while for others, such
as consulting, networking is much less the key.
When comparing networking opportunities for full time and part time students
, I would say “equal with some exceptions”, at least in Kellogg: majority
of the networking opportunities open to full time are also open to part
time; on the contrary, part time program create a lot of networking
opportunities that very few full time students come to attend. One
exception is the internship-related networking, which part time students do
not attend in a formal way. We will cover this later.
Career opportunity is the thing every MBA student cares much about –
otherwise, you won’t get into the program at the first place. There are
three major job categories for MBA students: Consulting, I-Banking and
corporate. To be honest, the career opportunities for full-time and part-
time are different – overall, career changers have better chances in a full
-time program; part-time students need to be more spontaneous to overcome
the gap. The difference is most obvious for I-Banking jobs, less for
consulting, and even less for corporate.
I-Banking is the hardest to break into if you do not have previous working
experience in finance or consulting, which is the target profile for banking
employers. That means, for career changers, if you do not have banking
intern, you have much less chance (on the other hand, if you do have a
banking intern, a full-time offer is almost guaranteed) – part-time
students usually do not have intern opportunities. For full-time career
changers, they face the same situation when interviewing for banking
internships. What they do is they will land a consulting intern first, and
then try to land a full-time banking one year later – the odds increase a
lot. Kellogg is not traditionally a banking school – for the past couple
years, there are usually around 5 part-time students successfully made the
career changes to banking, out of about 10 students who made the serious
attempts – so the odds is not that bad. However, those five are really
serious and spontaneous – some of them quitted the job to do an intern
first, and some others made a private trip to NYC to meet 40+ bankers in 10
days (you really need to be a “self-started networking guy” to do this).
Kellogg is more a consulting school – it has a super strong reputation
among all consulting firms – each year, around 1/3 of the class joins the
consulting industry, including internal consulting for corporate. Among the
200-ish offerees, about 100 accept the offers from the big 3: McKinsey, BCG
and Bain. There are also many other top strategy consulting firms, such as
Booz, Monitor, Marakon and ATK – they usually hire much less people.
Comparing consulting opportunities for full-time and part-time, the gap is
nominal. Part-time students may not be able to get as much close-list
invitations (by network + resume) as full-time fellows, but can make up
through open-list (by bidding). Overall, each consulting-focused student
can get at least 7-8 consulting interviews. Once you get into the interview
, firms care much less on your experience, networking or GPA (they still
affect their decisions though), but primarily on your performance in the
case-crack and fit. While in banking interviews, an excellent performance
in interview is not adequate to convince the firms – you need to do very
well in the networking or have a strong background (profile fit or intern)
to supplement the interview. Comparing to the case portion, the fit portion
is less decisive as long as you prepared for the basic questions (still a
lot) and did find some chemistry between yourself and the interviewer.
Corporate opportunities are equal in both programs, and may even favor part-
time students in some cases. Leadership and rotational programs prefer full
-time students because they are usually younger (it’s not a joke), while
functional positions (such as marketing, finance, or product management)
have more chances for part-time students because they just have more
experience. However, for the latter category, your background plays the key
– career changers have little chances for those positions – you better
compete with those “young faces” in the leadership programs.
There are also many other career opportunities: VC/PE, Asset Management, Non
-Profit, Entrepreneur and etc. They are not common categories and have much
higher requirements on previous experience and are more case-by-case.
In summary, the career opportunities for both programs in Kellogg do have
some difference but not much – everyone can get almost as much interviews
as he/she wants during the recruiting. However, the job placement for full-
time is better in average than for part-time. Here are the reasons, in my
opinion:
1.In recruiting, part-time students are not as committed as full-time (
because part-time have more back-up – they already have a job)
2.Part-time students are less flexible in job function/location – they
usually tend to have a family to raise, a mortgage to pay, a life-style to
keep or a green card to wait for
3.The intellectual caliber of part-time is averagely a little bit lower than
that of full-time (it is sad to say that, but it is true. A simple example
, the GMAT score for Kellogg full time is 710 on average, and 690 for part-
time)
4.Part-time students are averagely older than full-time, and some industry
prefers younger candidates, such as I-Bnaking and leadership programs.
But when it comes to individual, this should not be your major concern when
choosing which program to apply for: you should be committed if you are
serious about changing your career, even in a full time program; you could
be more flexible if you are willing to give up something (excluding family,
of course); getting into a full-time program or a part-time does NOT affect
your intellectual caliber – on the contrary, you are contributing yours
into the program; you could act earlier to apply for the program, so that
your age will be below average.
Then what should we concern when deciding which program to choose?
Again, we will cover that later ...
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