Tonight, I sat in class and listened to my fellow classmates summarize points from a textbook.
Let me repeat that.
Tonight, I, a 31-year-old graduate student, sat in class and listened to other grad students basically read from a college textbook. (Oh, I also kept a running tally of how many times the professor repeated himself for emphasis — or is that obvious?)
It makes you rethink that argument that MBA are valuable, doesn’t it? I know it’s tempting, but resist the urge.
I won’t lie to you: This particular class could be the poster child for the argument against MBAs. It wasn’t the topic of the course, but the professor and the curriculum that made most of my classmates consider the six sessions to be a colossal waste of time.
Case in point: Once we ran out of chapters to summarize tonight, the professor gave us two options for the remaining hour of class. We could either listen to him read a PowerPoint presentation about how to improve how we gave presentations (ah, irony), or we could have a Q&A and ask his advice on whatever we wanted.
Yes, on the surface, the 18 hours of class time required for this class appear to be a massive waste of time. Here’s why it’s not.
Who among us hasn’t run into a difficult, even egotistical, personality? Who hasn’t spent time in a meeting resisting the urge to check the clock for the 20th time while a colleague rambles on and on in a misguided effort to impress the boss?
The fact is, difficult personalities aren’t a rarity — they’re in every industry, in every company, at every level. And they’re not going anywhere.
That’s why it’s important to look beyond the coursework and the exams when debating the value of an MBA. Learning how to deal with difficult personalities and learning how to work with them — be they a professor, a boss, a client, or a colleague — is invaluable. And we only get better at it with experience. And what better place to gain experience than a class with mandatory attendance?
Even more important — and even more challenging — is learning how to find the small nuggets of insight in all the BS. Everyone has some insight to share, but certain personalities require more effort and patience to dig it out.
But when you make the effort to dig through and look beyond the quirks, you’ll often find a unique perspective. And these perspectives can be the very ones we need to make a better decision or draft a better strategy.
So, if nothing else, a seemingly pointless class is an opportunity to work on your listening skills. I’ll be the first one to admit that mine could use some work.
But I’ll also admit that, as many times as I internally rolled my eyes or smirked behind my hand at the bombastic advice coming from the professor, there were also times when he said something that really resonated with me and made me think. It can be a hard thing to accept that someone we dislike has good points to make, but it’s often true. And working on getting past a personal reaction to garner important insight makes those 18 hours of summarization worth it.
