ME and MBA Entrance Exam - Where can I find study help?

Please don't go for an MBA !

Unless you want to cloned corporate wisdom!

Ever noticed how they want engineers to study accounting and marketing?

When did you ever see an accountant or marketing man study engineering?

Get the qualifications necessary for you to get a job by all means but learn from experience and those with experience.

Nice response del.There is wisdom in your post. Meow . Meow.

I'm half way through my MBA- 4.0 Gpa. Acctg, finance, critical thinking,stats (guess who hosted study group?) Org behavior, etc.

After a career of battling the bastards, I thought 'why not join their guild?'

The accountants and finance profs had kittens when i challenged their thinking.

But my classmates got to see things practically. A lot of fun to give the academics more than they can handle. Think of it as great sport for mid career- jousting with PHD's

Arunk, If you are just graduating from bachelors program, you will be better off to get practical experience in some industry before getting your MBA. There is nothing like experience to help you with context in problem solving. and to give you foundation in how organizations really behave. If the ethics course is taght by a lawyer, or priest, drop the class til next time. the recent grads in my program work hard but are unable to bring insight or get traction on understanding, let alone solving, the problems in most cases.

The difference between having an ME and an MBA is that companies fire ME's at the end of the project; MBA's are the one's empowered to do it. So getting an MBA to buttress your personal economy is great idea; just don't think that you will be gaining much "wisdom". Its really paper training for the folks aspiring to a corner office.

Being a real engineer and having an MBA gives one an advanatage at subverting the BIG shots culture because you know real stuff they can't disprove and you can speak in their accounting babble.

Best advice- go get experience first, then your MBA will have teeth.

milo

High five Milo!

Nice response too!

I remember my Dad telling me how some accountant had proudly anounced he'd saved the company several hundred pounds by making the purchasing department change supplier for an order to purchase a billet of exotic alloy...Shame the whole team was then twiddling it's thumbs for 3 days, 'cos it was no longer 'next day' delivery!

Nil illegitemi carburundum. (don't let the bastards grind you down! Excuse the 'dog Latin')

The other one is:

'Excretia tauri astutos frustrantior'....

Very good first few ideas from the few first ones I read. I hope you noticed they all, pretty much say the same two things. 1. Look inward. and Two look at something else.However, and keeping with the same, what you are asking is to have info to pass. I am guessing you want to be an Engineer in Business, & probably your own! Correct? (please respond). Forget about the Engingeering part of it for a second and for the sake of my comment let us refer to that as 'E'. Typical is that one graduates from a Bba, gets experience and goes for a MBA to get the big promotion. If you don't have that experience, I will tell you how to get it real fast on a fundamental scale. OK? Off we go; I'm sure you have friends and family that have differing personalities. Keep that in mind. With any accounting software program set up a company that makes...mechanical clocks. Assume you can make and sell 100 of these 1000$ clocks per month. Now you have employees. They need to be paid, they need to be.....everything! Correct? Payroll, shop floor supervisor, technicians and even cleaners. Do a budget for that and enter all thae stuff you need to run a company into the software package. ( Don't forget to pay yourself minimum wage!!!! ). Besides your the brains behind this clock place. Now imagine worst case senario, you are down. You must have hired someone that had engineering ideas like you right! So he was probably a director in the first place because you wouldn't have hired him if he couldn't be. So he sees over things while you are ill. The company still keeps going as it did when you were steering; shamefully you are ill. You still get paid thoug right. Hell you are the owner. Opps, you are now dead. Your wife has the Company shares but she has not got a clue. Thankfully you, just as when you were ill, had hired someone as one of your directors to see the company go on. Dividends get paid to the wife, she probably would sell off 49% to the Directors for quick help cash. But maintains controlling intrest and a yearly dividend! Tada! See, you did it because you are a MBA!!!!. Oh if forgot you are the inventing Engineer also. Use you brains as an Engineer to create the product and your skill as a businessman to tell you to Butt out once you got the ball rolling. The friends and family part is there for the example of personalities that you will have to deal with. Bottom line, imagine all that, look with-in and you will pass the entrance by vertue!!! Just forget you're an Engineer when it comes to money. Think that way and just think of every possibility in the sinario I just gave. U B OK

Hmmm,

It's a real shame that you can not see the benefits of having a dual discipline. I have an engineering degree and a business degree. What it allows me to do is to see beyond the financial math and understand the technical issues when deciding to select an approach that is technically sound and feasible. Is that not a novel idea.

The other benefit I gained from it, is being able to provide a viable argument to any feasibility study and communicate it in ways that the guys with the money understand.

I have run in to many situation where the engineering group has made decision purely based on technical merits without consideration for cost and we end up with products that are not competitive on the market.

With zero sales, we no longer have the capital to employ the engineer, the accountant or the sales people because we are not competitive.

I believe and have the experience to say, that a dual discipline degree is a valuable asset and you will rise heads and shoulders above those in the organization that are too self-absorbed to recognize and will be bitter for being passed over when you get the promotion.

Keep in mind though that your emotional quotient must be high enough to manage the position. Education is great but an asshole manager with many letters behind is name is still and asshole who won't get very far.

Good Luck with your endeavours.

PS: There are many GMAT courses available at most universities. I highly recommend taking this course to get the practice you need to write your entrance exam. Many of the large bookstores also carry study guides.

Good sound comment 'guest'; sign up why don't you? Yes indeed having multiletters behind ones name and ones brain may spell the word a**-h**e, however, after years of it I guess get to also find out that they also spell brain sucker! It will be the first person that hurts you that you will grow against. Even with-in you. Human nature. Here is a multi discipline question for you: Can a religiously ordained Physicist go to confessional and report he has been working with extra terestial intellegent hardware? Who is wrong?

...'Can a religiously ordained Physicist go to confessional and report he has been working with extra terestial intellegent hardware?'...

Wow, that's a good question!

It's not that we can't see the benefits of dual disciplines.

It's more that, an experienced engineer can usually understand & manage those disciplines better than the 'book learning' and latest trendy theories pedalled by the 'educators', most of whom have never worked in the real world.

How many management philosophies and initiatives have we all seen come and go?

At my last company I got sucked into a 'Quality through People Initiative'

I stood up in front of the factory preaching the word...a few months later it was all forgotten and I was getting disciplined for supporting a worker who was being victimised by a vindictive HR manager over a trivial incident!

( I've never been one for the 'us & them' attitude...an at the time I was still playing in goal for the work's soccer team..I was Chief Designer)

Needless to say I quickly left ... Over the years I have gravitated towards smaller more individual companies. (You can kick me once, you may even get to kick me twice....but never 3 times)

Save us from HR departments! (small companies don't have 'em...the employees actually talk to eachother!)

As an alternative to the MBA why don't you enrole for an Engineeering Management degree. The university of Southern Queensland in Australia offers a Masters in Engineering management where you will complete the MBA subjects such as Accounting, Law, Economics and Management as well as the required Engineering subjects. The degree allows you to understand what the accountants and laywers are talking about, but you are still an Engineer.

I just took my GMAT (MBA entrance exam) my best advise is registar at www.mba.com then they give you a program that you download for free...

It is two pratice test and some review topics. That is my best suggestion, to help you prepare for the test...

Best of Luck! :)