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Related Discussions
Do your MBA along with your J.D.?
terrynicholasj
Free Trial Member
Hi all,
I got accepted to the University of British Columbia up in Canada. Pretty funny story, I actually 'argued' my way in. I was originally rejected and waaaayyyy down on the wait list. However, I sent them a lengthy e-mail arguing that their evaluation of my GPA was somewhat unfair (I did well on the LSAT though, their median is 164-166 or something and I was 171). After a lengthy back and forth and getting some information from old professors, they actually re-evaluated it and it worked out quite well. The major problem was that my school doesn't give out A+'s and so my GPA was like a full 3-4% lower than what it was supposed to be. Anyways, sometimes it's actually worth speaking out... the director also said the really enjoyed my Personal Statement and said that it's a lie that the admissions offices don't read them because she specifically remembered mine, which was really nice to hear. I was also offered a spot at Western, and they evaluated my cGPA as 3.03 hahahahahah and then probably they looked more closely at my last two years and maybe gave me like a 3.3 or 3.4. University of Toronto rejected me though outright, not even the courtesy of a waitlist lol. I get a chuckle about lawyering my way into lawschool.
Anyways. UBC actually has a pretty cool J.D./MBA program. Have any of you guys done these or looked at them? The issue is that my work experience is that of a long haul truck driver, a highway construction crew foreman and as a storefront counter worker, and despite the fact that economics and statistics are my favorite subjects and that I would be using my law degree mostly to try and get a leg up in the business world, I'm not sure if the MBA program is a good idea. Do you guys have any thoughts on this? Is it different doing a J.D./MBA as opposed to a pure MBA? I know you're supposed to have some industry work experience. Plus it's dammmmnnn expensive. But I did a cold take on a GRE and I managed to score above their 'recommended competitive requirements' for that exam (half of it is like the LSAT, but the math part I was AWEFUL at hahahaha).
Thanks folks. I hope you all have your fingers crossed if you're on the wait lists, or that you're celebrating an acceptance!
- Do the MBA?16 votes
- Yes do iiiiittt31.25%
- Nah don't it's a waste of money68.75%
Comments
If you have a JD MBA and apply to business related jobs, they will think how do we know this applicant wont jump ship and end up practicing law. Or better yet, why isnt he a lawyer. Did he not have the intellectual chops to practice law. The same could apply for law firms. You can always take business courses while attending law school but the additional cost of another degree far outweighs any marginal benefit
Heeeyyy @westcoastbestcoast hahahah I still think of Canada when I see your username. I mean, I'm pretty sure that if I show firms class standings they will see that it's not that I'm a crappy lawyer (unless I am a crappy lawyer), and I would think there are quite a few professions on the law side like realestate law, tax law and corporate law where a good sense of business would be valuable. Likewise, it seems to me that if you are working in the corporate or realestate world, having a good understanding of the laws that affect your business decision making might be useful.
I'm not trying to ask for people's opinions and then defend my positions, I guess I just have a hard time seeing an MBA actually hurting you, not just being an expensive neutral factor. But I will take your thoughts into consideration! You do have a point.
Follow your heart and what you want to do. You determine your destiny, if you feel like pursuing JD/MBA is beneficial to you then so be it. Just take some time off on your own to reflect and ask your self what is best for you and if you didn't have the financial burden of pursuing both, if you would still be pursuing it. If your heart truly wants it, trust me there will be a way to pay for it later, you might get an amazing job and pay your loans back. But remember you cannot bring back time so you don't want think back and say I wish I had made a different choice.
Good luck!!!
That is the most Canadian thing I have ever read. "They rejected me, I told them why I should be accepted, and now I'm accepted. "
@Sprinkles i mean i dont know why thats Canadian, but its not like they changed their standards, there was just confusion around converting my letterbased grades to a percentage, I noted that their scale wasnt a good reflection of reality and they agreed.
We Americans always tend to view Canadians as polite, reasonable, and accommodating. Very unlike how it usually is here in the US. I think that situation( "They rejected me, I told them why I should be accepted, and now I'm accepted. ") Would be highly uncommon here.
Hey, I didn't write that to offend you. I think what you did was credible and the outcome worked out for the best!
Hahahah alright no offence taken, i didnt write the story that well either. Anyways, it happened and Im pretty excited.
And I still need to figure out if the J.D. MBA makes sense. I thought a lot more people would have insight into this
Hi! I think it depends on what you want to do after law school. If you want to do corporate law, a JD/MBA would kind of prove to law firms that you're super interested in corporate law. But you don't need a JD/MBA to break into corporate law. Also if you want to ever go in-house/ break into i-banking or something finance related, I would imagine a JD/MBA might be useful...
I just wouldn't get a JD if your end goal is not to be a lawyer.
Disclaimer: I'm writing from a US perspective. Not sure how things are up in Canada.
Applicant: Hey you rejected me. Why??
Adcom:
https://78.media.tumblr.com/500ca1dfdd1d710efffcf064299b5df8/tumblr_nh3eetVdfU1qehu0oo6_400.gif
Edit: Donut and a letter of admission
Also, congratulations on getting into UBC (and your impressive LSAT score) @terrynicholasj ! Those are quite the achievements! I've heard a lot of great things about the school.
Joint degrees don't really make a lot of sense with a JD unless it is a JD/PhD at a really good school and you want to teach.
Usually, the other degree is not necessary to get a legal job. For instance, if you are from a Top 14 in the US and get decent grades, scheduling a couple classes 2L year related to corporate law along with getting a position 2L summer with a desirable firm will probably be the most you would need to customize your law school experience to get a Big Law position doing corporate work(I'm not as sure about the Canadian market). So the MBA won't do you much good in your initial job search if your first job is in law.
If your first job isn't in law then realistically you shouldn't have gotten the JD because it is going to be hard to get a first legal job without getting it directly out of law school. So if you do that your JD is just a talking point.
The only way I can see the JD/MBA making any real sense would be if you did corporate law for a few years and then went in house and then wanted to transition to doing non-legal work. The JD gets you into the corporate world, pays for itself through Big Law, and then gives you a contact with some people who want to hire you for a non-law position. In this case, you may not need the MBA(you might be able to do the job fine and have plenty of revelant experience and enough credibility with just the JD). The other thing is if you are not completely happy with whatever job you get offered/seek out, but want to make the transition away from law, the contacts from an MBA program would probably be useful. But, I imagine you would want them to be new rather than 6 or 7 years old. So why not get the JD, do corporate legal work for a while, try to transition in house somewhere where you like the culture, and then after a few years look to involve yourself in your corporation's non-legal side more. If that goes well, then consider trying to get a non-legal job(potentially where legal knowledge would still be important) and maybe get an MBA then to help facilitate the transition.
I don't see why you would spend the money on a degree you probably won't ever use. Additionally, one of the things an introductory finance class teaches you is the time value of money. As far as your personal finances, you are a whole lot better off saving anything you would spend on the MBA or decreasing the debt you have and then either not having to pay interest on as much debt or collecting interest on saving for a few years. If I told you, you could have $50,000 in real terms now or in 7 years you would take it now and invest it. The opposite goes for if I told you you could owe $50,000 dollars in real terms now or in 7 years. It is better to take on an expenditure in the future than the present. Now maybe you save money doing the degrees together, but it won't be as much of a savings as you think because of the time value of money.
Anyways, good luck and may your debt be low and gone quickly!
I'm actually applying for a JD/MBA program. But only after 3+ years of consideration, work experience, talking to people at work, outside of work, building up potential networks/jobs lined up. I don't think the dual degree is very helpful outside of a few specific jobs. And if I didn't already have things lined up the way I do, I would just get one degree or the other.
The most important is, if you get an MBA without having prior-relevant work experience to the program (most credible MBA programs require 2-4 yrs experience in a relevant field) it's incredibly challenging to get a lot of the jobs MBA grads expect to get, e.g., consulting, banking, high paying management, etc. Where I work it's very common that people apply with MBAs who don't have prior experience (or maybe just not enough...) and they end up getting dinged on that basis alone. Industry standard is 4 years, which is why a lot of MBA students are older. I'm always amazed at how much of a scam some of these programs are considering they absolutely know the relative outcomes for the people they admit.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that ultimately MBAs are usually for people who already have experience in a field and who are hoping to ultimately continue working in that field or a closely related one. Moreover, MBA degrees are seen, at least in the finance industry, as 100% useless. 95% of people who work in banking/finance/consulting with an MBA already worked in banking/finance/consulting before and they just come back as associates instead of lowly analysts. They go because making 200k is better than 120k. B school is very often a place people go to move up in the industry, not to start out.
On the flip side, if you're set on practicing law then the MBA part becomes largely unhelpful. Law is largely on-the-job training where the classroom learning is the theoretical stuff. MBAs are more "learn this stuff and then actually use it." With that in mind, and knowing what I know about law and business, I'm just not seeing what an MBA would add to your standard job in corporate law. And if it's not in corporate law, I really can't see what it would add at all?
Also as others have mentioned above, I think there is some danger in just tagging on an MBA to your JD. I’m not familiar with how legal jobs will perceive it but I’ve definitely heard enough to know they might question it. I think in general corp. it could be helpful, but outside of that I know I’d be skeptical. There isn’t a ton of overlap between the two programs the way a JD/MPP share core concepts. I do know how people applying to purely finance jobs are seen with an JD/MBA and it isn’t necessarily good. You’ll likely be seen as someone who didn’t get an offer for a legal job and are now just looking for anything. Add on lack of prior experience and the outlook is more doom and gloom. I'm sure there are anecdotes out there of people breaking into these jobs with little to no experience. I read them all the time on WSO and to me it's the law school equivalent of "that friend's brother who went to Thomas Jefferson School of Law and landed a big firm job." It happens but it's atypical.
You also asked if doing a JD/MBA is different from a pure MBA. I think each school does it a bit differently. Most of the schools I’m looking at have 4-year programs or even 3-year programs where you can take summer courses. I think you’d likely want to have your summers free for summer associate positions though? As for the actual classes you’ll be taking, at least in America, many of the joint programs have it so you can count some credits from classes taken for one program count towards the other. Other than that I think it’s likely just more work and more money… But you’d be basically taking all the same classes. So that's a plus if you like the eco/stats side of things
One thing that struck me in your OP was that you’re kind of just considering this ad hoc. It seems like you’ve got the opportunity and you like economics and stats, the school takes the GRE – you did well on that! – and perhaps an MBA seems like something to consider. Totally understandable! I’ll just say that I’d be really hesitant without prior experience in a specific field you wish to work in with the MBA. I wish I could find the words to accurately describe just how hard it is to get a job that pays what this degree is worth (I’m assuming you’d want to be making $150k+) without that requisite experience… The again, maybe America is a bit different in that respect.
I also think @"Seeking Perfection" made some really solid points above. Hard to argue with that logic.
It’s a topic near and dear to my heart so I figured I’d chime in to tell you what I think. I hope it’s helpful. I see this is a Canadian MBA/JD and perhaps some of what I’ve outlined above won’t apply to you. There are also several different MBA focuses and that might be something to think about. Check out some jobs on Linkedin and see what people with JD/MBAs are up to since graduating. You'll also be able to see what experience, if any, they had before they got the degree. From a cursory search, It seems like some of the people from that school end up working at large firms where the MBA might be somewhat helpful if that's what you're interested in doing. Maybe even reach out via message to a few and see if they'll answer more specific questions you have.
Best of luck in whatever degree(s) you choose to pursue!
-Alex
I'm in my 2nd year of a 4 year JD/MBA program and I love it. There's a lot of things I would love to improve about both sides, but ultimately it is all what you make of it. Full disclosure I go to school for free with my GI Bill, so the calculus is a bit different as I'll only graduate with less than $100k of COL debt, though if you go to big law straight out of a JD/MBA program I don't think it's that different because you can pay the debt down so quickly.
The flip side of the time value of money argument is that if you think of yourself as the investment rather than the monetary debt then it's better to do the joint degree instead of waiting 10-15 years of practicing law and then having to do an MBA on nights and weekends. I have made connections in business school that I know have the potential to pay dividends throughout my whole life and I can't really put a price on that because to me some of them are worth far more than the price of admission. If you go the corporate law route you are going to need to educate yourself somewhere and most attorneys I talk to in transactional practices had to teach themselves finance, accounting, or some other discipline on top of the new legal areas so it cut into personal time there pretty much no matter what.
I think the MBA is really valuable in that it just teaches you another way to think that is really different from how lawyers think so it just gives you a much broader perspective and I'm all for diversity of education so I love to seize on interdisciplinary opportunities. I think a lot of people don't value it because they might not have gotten much out of their own MBA, because again, like everything else in life it is all what you make of it.
The worry that people will not take you seriously as a lawyer or think you'll leave for the business world is a real but entirely overblown concern. As long as you have a narrative for why it adds value to you as an attorney then most people will be on board. It's when people can't answer questions about why they are doing an MBA that problems arise in interviews. I have been asked the MBA question in every interview I've had and it was never a weak point in the interviews.
Quite frankly if I could change law school I would make it two years of law and one year of business because there is just so much to learn on the MBA side as they have so much more geared towards leadership, organizational behavior, management, and other soft skills that would be really value added for lawyers and law firms.
Finally, I think a JD/MBA will become an increasingly valuable degree for individuals as the legal industry is revolutionized by automation and other legal tech because JD/MBAs will have the ability to be a bit more agile in navigating a truly 21st century legal system and hopefully pivot to areas of growth when the time is right.
I think the JD/MBA is useful. You can open up your own law firm and rent out offices to other attorneys and know exactly what you're doing.You can network with fellow attorneys and open a consulting firm. Another option is corporate law, which other users have stated you don't need a JD/MBA for. I think the sky is the limit with a JD/ MBA in my opinion. If you do it right you will be financially set.