In the past few months, more and more people are seeing the value of these networks. “In the past five weeks, I have been talking to students and candidates nonstop from 9 to 5,” said Steve Summers, Recruiting Lead For Rice Business Professional MBA Programs.
But the current crisis is also prompting many professionals to take action on their careers. “You can talk yourself out of something if you want to be talked out of it. But others are saying, ‘I finally have a chance to pause. I have an hour now in my day when I can research business school,’” Summers said. “They want to take control and not be defined by all the unknowns. Especially in our professional program, where folks are working at the same time, what they are learning makes them so valuable to their employers, and needed more than ever.”
Business schools themselves are changing. Even before COVID-19, top business schools were changing their model, adding more leadership and critical thinking courses to core subjects like finance, accounting and marketing. According to the Princeton Review, 71.1% of MBA applicants surveyed were aiming for senior leadership positions, and 94.4% were considering changing industries.
Rice Business alumna Marjorie Ma was one such candidate. Working as a consultant in China for Deloitte, she enrolled in the fulltime class of 2012 to prepare for a different type of corporate job. “I wanted to do an MBA program to enrich my experience,” she said. It worked. After graduating from Rice Business, Ma pivoted from both her job title and her firm itself, and now is Vice President of product management and market intelligence at AIG.
With its small classes and supportive culture, Rice Business is designed to help that kind of career change. You can see the results in recent class profiles. After decades of heading to energy and financial services sectors, in 2021-22 Rice Business MBAs gravitated instead to consulting jobs. Nearly a third of them — 34.6 percent — took consulting positions, earning an average of $166,646. Overall, members of the class of 2022 reported an average base salary of $142,212 — a boost of over $10,000 from the year before.
To ensure that graduates have these kinds of choices throughout their careers, a top business school invests enormous attention on both its curriculum — and each student as an individual, Rice Business Dean Peter Rodriguez said.
“In the past, we thought a lot about deep quantitative skills and core competencies. All that is still very necessary,” Rodriguez said. “But today you also need enhanced skills around being a leader. Those skills will help you make great decisions, express wisdom, show empathy, lead organizations through tough times. They will help you give purpose to work.”
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Interested in learning more about the MBA programs offered by Rice Business? Send us an email at ricemba@rice.edu.