About
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This site contains all of the advice that I would have liked to have heard before I took my MBA.
The advice is informed by my own experiences, first as a full-time MBA student, and subsequently also as a teacher and guest lecturer on MBA, Executive MBA, and Executive Education programs – all at IESE Business School in Barcelona and New York.*
I created The Fishbowl MBA because I thought something was missing in the world of MBA advice. As to the MBA experience, there are lots of good blogs and books sharing how being a business school student feels like. As to getting in, as well, there is a whole industry telling you how to ace the top-tier admissions process. But nowhere did I find a practical and well-informed guide on how to make the most of your MBA, once you had made it past the gatekeepers.
For instance, how do business schools actually work? How do you build a good team, survive the exams, and get a job that’s right for you? How do you finance it all? How do you avoid getting kicked out of school? For that matter, how do you keep your relationship alive? (Quick stat: 50% of relationships don’t survive an MBA.) Should you even do an MBA? To all of these questions, I found precious few useful, unbiased answers.**
This is the void I hope to fill with The Fishbowl MBA. The idea, in short, is to provide a site that offers you concise, personal advice, free of marketing speak and without too much irrelevant detail. The only liberties I have taken is to add the occasional mood piece and a section with fun stuff. It’s not all serious, after all.
Enjoy the reading; good luck with the MBA, if you decide to take one – and please, contribute with comments or guest postings if you have something to share.
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg
Visit my personal website for more information.
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Footnotes
*For the readers who may not be familiar with IESE: it is a full-time, two-year MBA program, situated in Europe but built on Harvard’s MBA model and similar in structure to most US programs. It is ranked in the global top-tier segment, and while I studied there, it was twice ranked #1 in the world by The Economist (in 2005 and 2006). The school has campuses in Barcelona, Madrid and New York. IESE’s website contains more information.
**In fact, there are a few books out there that purport to provide advice to MBA students. Unfortunately, the ones I read weren’t that helpful. (One book, for instance, advised me to “get to know the local transportation schedules”. Another recommended that I “take notes in class”. Sorry, but who needs to be told this?) If you encounter any good guides for MBA students, please let me know and I might recommend them here.
And, as to the title of the site, I will eventually post a blog explaining everything.
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