MIT Sloan supported my successful career change

Experience during the program

MIT Sloan has been an exceptional experience and exceeded my expectations in supporting my career change from Military to Consulting.

I initially dismissed MIT in my MBA applications as too "technical." However, as I spoke to more people, applied, and have spent the past year here I feel that MIT excels in all technical and analytics topics while not compromising on traditional management education.

Career/Recruiting
My goal entering MIT was to enter consulting in the short term and prepare for international management in Asia. To that end, I took a broad curriculum in all management basics, with a specialization in business analytics through Sloan's new Analytics certificate. For results, Sloan's Asian Business Conference led me to intern at an outstanding Japanese company as their first ever MBA intern, and earn a full-time offer at a Management Consulting firm. I have found that the formula of my military (interpreted as high soft skills) combined with cutting-edge analytics training at MIT (about as technical as it gets in business) generates immediate interest from most executives with whom I have interviewed.

Culture:
Hands-down, Sloan has the top 2-3 cultures among all MBA programs. Students and alumni are high-quality, close-knit, ultra-supportive, and excited about Sloan. When connecting with alumni in firms or industries of interest, I have close to a 100% response rate. Culture is definitely more casual at Sloan compared to other top programs; it's very much a t-shirt/button-down results-over-appearance culture.

About professors, classes and curriculum

Strengths:
1) Access to the ENTIRE MIT ecosystem for classes.
2) Anything Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science related.
3) System Dynamics (it was invented here)
4) Operations: Logistics, Supply Chain, etc...

Management staples: Finance, Accounting, Marketing etc..are universally high quality but I wouldn't say that they are ground-breaking or a special strength.

Weaknesses:
Leadership: Limited curriculum and less focus on the students future role as leaders of large companies. In general, Sloan seems not to be viewed as a general management program.

About job placement process

Outstanding placement in consulting and tech. Most people (80%+) that wanted a consulting offer seemed to get at least one of their top 5 firms. That being said, MBB is still very tough here and I estimate no more than 40% of people who recruited for consulting got an MBB offer.

Tech: Amazon is the strongest tech firm on campus (around 10-20 people headed there I believe). To some degree Google (around 5 full-time offers I believe), while Facebook doesn't really come up very often. Tesla has also recently started recruiting here and will take some full-time folks.

Entrepreneurship: If you want to do a start-up or join one, the sky's the limit here. Extremely strong alumni network into startups and the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship with Bill Aulet is an outstanding starting point for getting into startups.

Finance: Full Disclosure: Didn't participate in finance recruiting myself. Some of the main banks come here but finance is less popular at Sloan as a rule. For some people, this is an advantage as there is less competition for slots but there are also a few top banks that don't come here because of the smaller student body and reduced level of interest. Still, academically, there is a strong history of finance learning at Sloan and my finance oriented classmates are very satisfied with their learning.

Overall BSchool experience (5.0)
Schools contribution (5.0)
Classmates rating (5.0)

Strengths of the program:

Curriculum, Classes, Professors
Brand/Ranking
Culture & Student Support

Best fit at this program:

Consulting
Tech
Entrepreneurship

Can be improved:

Facilities
Specialization in a particular area (e.g. Finance, Consulting, Healthcare, etc)
Leadership