Ask an MBA Admissions Consultant

Hi Everyone,

I am applying for part time MBA to NUS/NTU. I am from IT bank ground, and in last 5 year of professional career I have worked for Bank ( 2.5 years), normal IT projects (1 yr), and payment systems(1.5 yrs).
my deep desire is to work for an investment bank for few years and later work as financial/investment consultant. For this reason, I did one year diploma in Banking. However, I get to know from an MBA alumni that its too late for me to enter into investment bank and If I want to enter into investment bank, i should rather go for full time long MBA.
He suggested me to for general MBA. I am fine to do general MBA but I want to hear experts view point on 3 things -

1) If I do part time MBA in finance, what kind of opportunity i may get in after completion of MBA ?
2) If I do general MBA, Will I be able to enter into finance industry?
3) Will I get a chance to switch my specialization once I entered into B-School?

Please help.

Hi sunnyjohn--

EssaySnark doesn't have much experience with NUS/NTU so we're going to answer your questions generically, and hopefully someone else can contribute who knows more specifics about your target schools.

It is always harder to switch to a new career through a P/T program. And, if you want to work for one of the top IBs, you need to go to a top bschool (F/T).

It can be difficult, but not impossible, to switch from a very different career to ibanking. Most engineers are good with quant and so that's one skill you probably are strong in, which will serve you well in the transition. But your friend is right, many IBs look for younger people to start, based on finances and culture.

We're not really sure what you mean by a "general MBA" -- at many top bschools, you can choose your own concentration or major. What that means is that you will get a general management education through their core courses, and then you can choose "finance" as a specialty or area of focus. This is very common in the US and European schools and we assume it works that way at the schools in Asia.

And yes, you can switch your specialization after entering -- in most cases, you will indicate on the app that you want to study finance, but if you change your mind you can do so usually before the second year. (The first year is typically all the core courses plus maybe one or two electives.)

On your first question, what kind of job can you get through a P/T MBA, you should talk to the career services people at your target bschool to see what they say. Sometimes they don't have much support for the P/T students; schools have different policies with this. But, the MBA education is the same at most schools whether you do it through the F/T or the P/T track, so in theory, you could get the same type of job regardless of P/T or F/T. It just depends on what resources the school has to help the P/T students with the job search.

We probably didn't answer all your questions sufficiently so hopefully someone else can jump in here too!!

EssaySnark

Hi Essay Snark,

Thank you very much for such a detail answers. you have cleared all of my doubts.

Thanks,
Sunny