January 9th, 2007, 4:38 am
QuoteOriginally posted by: KackToodlesC'mon, you should know better. UT (and MIT) achieves tech integration by attracting former engineers, doctors and computer scientists to their MBA program and training them to become proper MBAs. That's not the model that either MIT or UT uses. MIT in particular has a lot of informal programs (i.e. entrepreneur contests) that encourage engineers to develop business skills, and a lot of informal networks. You look at someone who has started their own company, and that gives you some idea as to how it can be done. UT has a very good MBA program, but it doesn't have the links with science and engineering that MIT has. On the other hand, UT Austin is really strong at things like project management because of the demand from the semi-conductor industry. Also, an MBA isn't that useful for ***starting*** a company. It's useful for middle managers running a large company, but the skill sets are quite different.QuoteHa ha, if you cannot appreciate that an MBA course is worth much more than $1000, you don't not belong in one. You want it, but you don't want to pay the market price for it. You want to smooooooch! Getting a bank interview through the UT MBA program is worth about $1000 to me. Above that, then there are cheaper/easier ways for me to get those interviews.QuoteWhen you refuse to apply/enroll in the MBA program, you are telling them YOU are not interested in integrating some MBA knowledge. How does letting some untrained (therefore, unintegrated) science phds with zero formal business training interview in their career office "integrating" tech? The important thing in getting interdisciplinary things happening is to get people talking to each other. Just having science Ph.D.'s in the business school allows for some conversations that otherwise would not take place.One other thing..... The reason I'm rather pro-active in doing stuff like this was because I worked in a large oil company for seven years. If you sit down and wait for orders, *nothing happens*. To get anything done in a large bureaucracy, you have be something of a proactive pest. Sit back and follow procedure just causes the company to ossify.QuoteBusiness at the professional level is not some fly by the night activity that any physics phd is suddenly an expert in by expressing an "interest". An MBA entails some serious amount of education in business and economics and human relations. That's why banks encourage even their best employees to go back to get an MBA and sometimes even pay for it. Which I can get by buying books and looking at what is going on around me. I'm not a Ph.D. fresh out of school. I've had about a decade of work experience, and most of that involved development lead work. At some point, I'll probably go back to school, but it will likely be to law school. As far as getting people business experience, I really don't think that the traditional MBA is the most useful format for getting physics Ph.D.'s into the business world. It has a assembly line model of education which I think is all wrong.Everyone is different, and for a lot of people, getting an MBA might be just the thing that they need. However, it annoys me when people sell MBA's like fizzy water and assert that if you get one, people will fall all over you. Business is hard work, but the good news is that there are a million ways of playing the game of capitalism.There seems to be a contradiction here. At one level, you are talking about how wonderful elite schools are, but when I mention the good parts of MIT (the emphasis on technical education and the relatively deemphasis on formal curriculum for learning things) you tend to disagree. Why is that?