The post Harry made was very good about the CFA vs MBA. I have a few personal thoughts too. 1. The MBA program is a general program where many students from different locations, interests, and business experience come together to learn. Classroom discussion is quite interesting and forces one to think outside the box. Very few finance students in my cohort so I get to hear insight from former ops managers, sales force managers, and HR reps. While my niche is financial services, it is nice to hear how things work at various other industries. 2. AF is a quasi MBA program. Let me explain. Many smart individuals come onto this board to discuss current events, each level of the CFA, and current employment/business scenarios that they are currently facing. This is the cusp of an MBA program; except in school you discuss popular HBS Cases (aka the casebook, most schools do this I think), new editions of marketing, accounting, management, and econ textbooks, etc. I wish the MBA program did a better job of bringing the WSJ/CNN/Fox/etc into the classroom. Sadly most of the class discussion is on the casebook, even when some of the cases discussed stem from the 1980s. 3. While the MBA is expensive and not as impressive as a CFA, I feel many of you on the board would enjoy it more than the CFA. The camaraderie experienced with classmates is quite nice. It is an instant network that you are part of for life, so shoot for the moon with your GMAT like I should have. The externalities that one enjoys is something the MBA ROI calculation omits.
What major do new MBAs with heavy prior finance experience/education (CFA, etc.) usually choose when they come in? A CFA charterholder coming into a MBA program to take more basic finance courses would be a real waste. Management/Strategy? I’ve been looking at the course offerings for Harvard Business school and there’s a really impressive display of strategic business courses offered there.
Though I just began, I’m focusing on strategy/entrepreneurship. I’m surprised to see that I’m enjoying a lot of the management/marketing classes. Being on the front edge of business development seems like a great position. +100 on the finance classes being a waste. There are a few interesting ones I would not mind taking, but I could easily learn them on my own with a good book, and I don’t want to sit through the prerequisites necessary thus wasting more learning time and money to hear some prof teach me NPV for the 3rd time in my life. Strategy is very interesting to me. There is a strategy club on campus that I’m getting involved in. Clubs are another overlooked area of B School. Many clubs here (and at other schools) bring the classroom material to practice in the real world. The venture capital club here is doing a modeling and pitch project for a VC firm in the area. This is a huge resume kicker!
You don’y have to take the basic courses. Just cherry pick the advanced courses not covered in the CFA.
If you have a CFA, some schools let you skip the basic Finance course. The main thing about getting an MBA is not the course load, but the network.