Just a question. Should I assume here that you've never actually worked inside a business?
My prediction is that in a few years, you will be complaining and resentful that the people that drink like a fish and know how to party are getting further in their careers than you are. You'll be talking about how it "isn't fair" that you got the grades, you did the work, you are smarter, and they are getting the money and the jobs.
This is how business works. If you want maximum money for minimum work then science and engineering is a horrible path to take. If you think that in the end you are going to get rewarded financially or in social status for spending the extra time and effort to do science and engineering, you are also deluding yourself.
Shaun_W said:
You do not require a business degree to acquire these social and communication skills.
You don't, but it helps. Also, business degrees give you some basic skills like reading a balance sheet and basic organizational theory. There are other ways of getting those skills, but if you go for a technical degree, you do have to realize that you will be deficient in some of those skills and actively look for ways of improving.
They should be acquired as part of any other degree that involves lots of team and project work, and can also be acquired in part-time work, through socialising, etc.
They can. But I'm not sure about should. If you really like physics, then study physics. If you really don't care about physics and math (and most people don't care about physics and math) and you just want a degree that gets you some basic skills that gets you a job so that you don't starve to death, then a business degree is a reasonable thing to get.
I believe that a lot of these skills are also largely natural, too. And people that naturally possesses these skills sure as hell don't need a business degree.
Actually they may. Something that you'll find out is that sometimes you just need the piece of paper to get past the gatekeeper. You may find yourself in a situation in which HR just tosses the resume of anyone that doesn't have an MBA, and being good at social and politics, you get the MBA.
Not all companies are run by MBAs, and aren't MBAs something mainly pursued by people who aren't from a business undergraduate background?
Any large company has a ton of MBA's in middle management. MBA's are terrible training for people that want to start their company, but if you have a 200,000 person company, you are going to need a ton of corporate bureaucrats, which is where an MBA comes in.
I know engineering firms are often really keen to put those engineers who have been earmarked for future leadership development through MBAs, fully funded. Probably something that I'll do one day, too.
Sure. If you like engineering then do engineering. If you hate engineering, don't like math, and want to make the maximum money for the minimum effort (i.e. most people) then a business degree is a good way to go.
I'm a geek. Most people aren't. I like to think. Most people don't. I like to ask questions. Asking questions can get you in trouble in a big bureaucracy.
One thing that I have to do to get anywhere in business is to convince my bosses, that in the end, I will follow orders. If you have someone that is less intelligent, they are more likely to follow orders without thinking about them, and more likely to get hired to be a corporate bureaucrat.
Personally, I think that people talk too much about leadership. The problem with leaders is that you don't need that many of them, and you are more likely to be a follower than a leader.
Also, the job of a business leader is to get other people to do work so that he or she can take credit for it, and then make the people that did the work feel good about that situation. It's not a coincidence that more political leaders have been actors than engineers since acting probably gives you more useful skills to be a leader than engineering school.
All of the business leaders I know, albeit not that many, work extremely hard - so hard that the typical business student would have a stroke if they were to hear about the hours they put in.
Sure. But the MBA is not intended to train business leaders. One important fact is that you really don't need that many leaders in a company. If you have a company with 200,000 people, you only have one CEO, and maybe 100 senior managers. You also have about 50,000 mid-level and junior level corporate bureaucrats, and those are the spots that you want people with business degrees in.
If you want to spend years of your life fighting to get to the top then that's great, but most people aren't like that, and maybe that's a good thing. If you have a company with 50,000 people each thinking that they should be CEO, then you'll find that those places tend to be extremely unpleasant places to work.
You don't need Albert Einstein to be a regional divisional manager, and probably you don't *want* Albert Einstein to be a regional divisional manager. Einstein is going to get bored and annoyed, and maybe it's better for society if he think about relativity than about getting the fonts on the powerpoint right. But most people aren't Einstein, and most people really don't want to be Einstein.