Second Year MBAs: The Dukes of Moral Hazard

The two years spent in an MBA program are likely the most dynamic (even unstable) years in your life. The first year at Owen is heavily concentrated in the Core, which basically takes your life and sucks it down into a deep, dark hole.  You’ll spend the first three MODs working harder than you ever can imagine.  100 hour weeks become the norm, you begin to feel like the library should become your permanent mailing address, and you’re bouncing back and forth among Finance, Marketing, Operations, Accounting, and almost every other business subject you can imagine.  The workload is unmanageable, but somehow you prioritize your deliverables and you make it through.

Along comes MOD IV, and all of the sudden the workload gets a little lighter.  The deliverables are, shockingly, manageable.  You start to maybe even take a Saturday off.   You’ve likely decided on an Internship and start shopping around for housing.  The Capitalist Ball (aka, Prom) lets everyone blow off a considerable amount of steam.

Then, all the sudden, your first year is done.  You end up doing a little traveling before your Internship begins.  You move to a new city, meet new people, and fill your days with new experiences.  You complete your Internship and then pack up and move back to Nashville and prepare for your second year.
You attack your Second year with much the same ferocity you took into your first year.  You’re ready to get back to academia and resume filling your brain with information and proving your aptitude.  You’re also very much ready to get back and stick it to the first years with all of your accumulated knowledge. 
But, then… Something happens.

Sometime between November and February, the climate shifts.  The majority of the class is now holding at least one job offer.  Many people have already accepted. You then look at your GPA and begin calculating the chances you’d be able to actually gain or lose even one tenth of a point.  And then it hits you--- you realize you can’t change your class ranking, and even if you did--- it wouldn’t matter anyways.  You are already sitting on job offers that wont change regardless of how hard you work.  Or, if you’re still looking for the right job, you think back and realize nobody has ever really even cared what your GPA was.

And so it begins.  The “Senior Slide” takes full effect.  Second years go from taking four or five courses per mod to one or two.  The chance of seeing a second year burning the midnight oil in the library becomes roughly the same odds of Britney Spears winning the Nobel Peace Prize. 

The strange thing is that we’ve just spent the previous 18 months having the concepts of incentives and moral hazard beaten into our brains.   MBA’s are masters of expected future value--- its one of the fundamental concepts that defines our education.  So we all sit back and realize the expected future value of us beating ourselves to death in 2 or 3 more courses rapidly approaches zero. 

I guess my take-away is this.  The MBA curriculum is very similar to a theme park roller coaster.  It starts off big, throwing you around, seeing how much you can take.  There’s a little breather right in the middle as it climbs up the second hill.  That second hill takes you for a short, but extreme burst of dips and turns, and then it ends far too quickly and you pull into the station wishing you didn’t have to get off. 

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[Asif Shah]

You never know, Britney Spears may surprise us still!