THACHARTER – There is a critical piece of the equation that your posts don’t capture – it’s what you want to do after business school. You’ve talked extensively about what you’ve been doing to date, but I don’t feel that you have explained exactly what you hope to achieve afterward. You say you want to keep working on the “buy-side” but in what capacity? As you know, a lot of people think getting an MBA is a golden ticket to getting into the buy-side – especially at the top business schools – but this is a data point that’s positively skewed by the number of people that had relevant experience. In other words, very rarely will you see someone that worked in manufacturing or biotech successfully transition to a mega buyout fund just because they went to HBS or something. Everyone that gets the mega buyout shops already had prior investment banking or PE experience.
My personal reasons for wanting to go back to MBA is because I’m either looking to go back to private equity after business school, or transition into a strategy role at a major company. This makes sense for my candidacy because I already have two years in private equity, and am currently doing a pre-MBA strategy internship at a Fortune 50 company. However, in both cases, I would basically need an MBA in order to jump to the next payscale because very few PE firms offer direct promotes from pre-MBA to post-MBA associates, and there are equally few strategy roles for pre-MBA’s anywhere.
Back to your posts, the only specific point you mentioned is that you hope to come back to the buy side at a “higher level”…but doing what? Same type of role? When you look at the other fund accountants, how many of them were doing fund accounting prior to getting an MBA and came back afterward? My guess would be less than 5%. Need to think more critically about this decision.
Basically, I think you need more clarity on your post-MBA goals. Yes, maybe it’s prudent to ask the people at the information session what they think you should do, but of course they are going to tell you to apply to business school. Why wouldn’t they? I’m sure they would be happy to take your money. If you want to transition to a money-management role, going to a top MBA school would certainly help you facilitate that transition, but you would probably need to start out on the sell-side first in some capacity. On the other hand, if it’s possible for you to get a buy-side analyst role just through networking and moving up in the company, your ROI would be much better than paying for b-school of any kind.
Hope this helps…