MBA - the view from base 1 will have to do me!

part time MBA - keeps you busy.  I knew I would be, but never really stopped to think about it.  I remember friends from before, James Couper and Ken Webster each telling me how hard it was for them to study an MBA whilst working full time.

 

For the most part, it's doable.  What frustrates me at the moment is that there are some courses that I'm interested in and want to learn, but I struggle to learn well in the time.  Partly because the lectures are in Chinese, which doesn't help my understanding of the harder concepts, and partly because my schedule of work/study/mandarin and a little bit of life keeps me rather too busy.

 

It's a real shame, because I'm learning more in the courses that I was already familiar with, but the real value for me has to be in these courses I'm not familiar with, but now have insufficient time to do justice to.  After some time it will be easier, once my mandarin improves further and I can ease off on the mandarin front.  Maybe then I'll see if I can go over some MBA material again.

 

Begs the question of course, if I'm not learning lots of new things, then what's the MBA for?  Partly, by virtue of graduating, it's a confirmation of what I know, regardless of how little or much of it I learned through the course. It's also significant in furthering my academic qualifications - otherwise I only have a Bachelors.  Given I can pick up a degree without having to stop work, why not.  There's an aspect of localisation - I may be working for an European company, but HKU and Fudan really are Asian Universities.  Lastly, there's alumni.  Curious eh - only one aspect relates to the academics.  Terrible really, but it's the truth - there is a lot of extracurricular value to be had from an MBA.