Graduate Blog / Graduate Life

Choosing the Right MBA Concentration

Remember that time in school when they asked you what you want to be in the future? One year you wanted to be a firefighter and the next a doctor and an architect in another. While asking myself what MBA concentration I wanted to pursue, I was in a similar situation.

The Babson MBA offers you the opportunity to pursue two out of five concentrations across areas that of significant importance in today’s dynamic world. After running through a few options, I decided to pursue the business analytics and marketing concentration. Here’s what helped me make my decision:

Career goal: The exposure you get in the first year through the different courses of strategy, marketing, analytics, finance and entrepreneurship, is a great place to start to identify your interests. With a little aid from the professors in understanding what a career in that field entails, you will be able to narrow down your options.

Having a background in marketing and an inclination towards consumer psychology, I knew marketing was definitely going to be one of my concentrations.

Industry trends: After narrowing down your main field of interest, it is important to know what the current trends in the field are. Today no marketing campaign can be planned without having access to and understanding a ton of consumer data. Being able to detect what data you need to ask for and what you can do with that data is a great strength to possess. Courses like Marketing Analytics, Business Intel Visualization and Intro to Data Science take you through a step by step process of processing data that will help you drive marketing campaigns and retain your customers.

Knowing that there is a strong demand for these skills in the field of marketing, I decided upon my second concentration – business analytics. Courses in this track teach you everything from basic segmentation and targeting to running regression models and decision trees in R.

Hunger to Learning: Despite pursuing two concentrations, the Babson MBA program is designed in such a way that it gave me the flexibility to choose more courses outside of the courses required for the chosen concentrations. Entrepreneurship and financial modelling did peak my interests in the first year. These interests drove me to choose New Venture Creation and Equities as additional courses to my concentration. New Venture Creation helps you think about every aspect of starting and running a business. Things like understanding your consumer, defining your customer value proposition and projecting future cash flows can be applied to your own business as well as any corporate role.

Even though my MBA degree will officially say MBA – Business Analytics & Marketing, with the flexibility the Babson MBA offers and the courses you are offered in the first and second year, I think I am getting an MBA in everything.