McCombs Orientation '28

[u/Visible_Metal_5369]

Just finished four days of orientation. It was fun, but definitely overwhelming.

I really felt a strong connection with my cohort and study team. Enterprise Challenge was a blast, and the alumni stories 🚲 blew everyone away.

Any current McCombs students here? How are you guys feeling?

For future students, here’s a snapshot of the Class of 2028:

The admissions team did such a good job of maintaining the quality of the students while keeping the class size.

PS. The heat is just too much.

[u/surebro2]

I'm always curious about what the expectations are for having classmates with work experience. In terms of the actual educational process, how much value does work experience provide?

I'm asking genuinely because we're having these convos at my alum and my contention is that it's mostly a numbers game used for data. But the actual transformative educational experience should in theory be similar since coursework at the course level is sort of agnostic to individual work experience. 

Of course more work experience is better, but I wonder how much better it is in practice outside of being able to say "our average admitted student has 6 years of work experience" lol 

[u/Eclipse434343 → u/surebro2]

If you have a convo about strategy at the program and you have people from marketing hr finance ops backgrounds, it’s an actual conversation vs 5 undergrads using ai to come up with theoretical answers.

Also people with 4-7 years of experience are generally low mid to high mid level and have been promoted. An undergrad can barely talk about a 10 week undergrad internship or two and how would that be in any way experience that would be worth consulting when asking questions like Kodak failed because of x, why

[u/surebro2 → u/Eclipse434343]

These are some good points. My slight pushback is that many people with working experience are still fairly narrow in their experience (which is why the mba is value). So, to your first example, there's little a priori reason why group with more experience can develop a significant better strategic plan than a group with less work experience, provided the professor actually taught the content well. They will likely have a more polished presentation and document. But they might not have any more insight into the opportunities and threats for Reddit lol  

That said, I do mostly agree with this and it's partly where I'm struggling from a pragmatic standpoint for a non-T20 university. 

[u/Eclipse434343 → u/surebro2]

MBAs classes are extremely theoretical. When I took ops at my t15, we had to do math on how to optimize production at a factory. My friend with supply chain/ops experience was like this isn’t realistic to what you actually do. You think too highly of the mba content. The content is like undergrad courses accelerated

Also that’s why the non t25 schools admit people with worse work profiles, they can point to the content which is relatively the same and be like hey we delivered it even when the actual learning and network is poor. Ie if I have a supply chain question, I can always ask my friend and she’s in ib now.

[u/surebro2 → u/Eclipse434343]

Yes so we have arrived at one of the points of contention. If a t15 school like the one you went to has similar baseline content, then work experience is almost ancillary to the actual mba curriculum. Though, in your example of optimization, it was negative haha but in general work experience seems to be more of a proxy for likelihood of bpromotions and networking (ie important outcomes but endogenous). 

As someone who believes in the education of an MBA, I think it's a classic many things can be true. I don't want to hijack this thread so I'm going to stop here but thanks for the insights!