Outside the banquet hall was a long buffet with sandwiches, crudité and refreshments—a welcome touch for the many attendees who had rushed to the forum straight from work.
After an hour of networking with individual schools, the women were ushered into an adjacent room, where they heard first from a panel of recent MBA alumnae and later from a panel of admissions representatives.
Real Women MBAs Dish on What It’s Like
The close to 100 women who filled the room were greeted initially by Ann Hargraves, director of graduate recruiting for Liberty Mutual, which sponsored the Boston Forté Forum. Keeping her remarks to a minimum—but throwing in the nugget that women with an MBA, on average, attain a 51 percent increase in salary—Hargraves was quick to hand things over to the alumnae panel, which included MBA graduates of Babson College, Yale School of Management, the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon, and MIT Sloan.
A lively group, the alumnae shared candidly about what led them to business school in general, what attracted them to the program they ultimately chose to attend, challenges and hurdles they met along the way and some of the things they loved the most about getting their MBA. They also shared the ways in which the degree has enabled them to advance in their career, as well as tips and advice for women trying to decide if business school is right for them.
Technical Skills Are Great. Communication Skills Are Better.
Almudena Arcelus studied electrical engineering in her native Mexico before heading to MIT Sloan for her MBA, where she was seeking to obtain finance skills. “But once I got to business school, the most important skills I learned were organizational behavior, marketing and communications—with a big focus on communications,” she says.
Today, as a principal at the Analysis Group, many of her colleagues are brilliant PhDs from some of the top economic schools in the nation, she says. “But they literally, a lot of them, don’t know how to work in groups. They tell me, you MBAs work together and you know how to do things together,” she says. “The MBA is going to give you the technical skills that you are looking for to be successful, but it is also going to give you the people skills that I think are even more important than the technical skills. And also the ability to learn as you go along.”
As moderator, Hargraves chimes in: “I think an economics PhD teaches you how to research and understand and an MBA teaches you how to make decisions with all that data.” The entire panel nods.
