I am looking at getting a tax job with a major corporation(Fortune 20). Might not get it, but it's pretty ideal for me as it will allow me to complete my Masters in Accounting and get my CPA experience quicker than a public accounting job which would be less pleasant and wouldn't let me start for another year when school is completely done.

I enjoy tax but don't know if I want to make it a career. Anybody here move from tax pre-MBA to something else? Will I be stuck? Are there many jobs where tax knowledge is valued but where you aren't focused on compliance and tax planning.

I got a 760 on the GMAT and think I should be competitive in other respects for a top MBA program down the road. I might do law school as an alternative if I decide in a few years I want to take my tax career to the next level(and the legal market is less of a nightmare than it is now).

You really need to work out what you want to do first. You have a good GMAT score, but you don't necessarily want to burn through $100k simply to use it.

Both business school and law school will offer many different options outside of tax. You need to be clear which you want, because it is expensive.
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Hi Diogenes,

Welcome to the forum and congratulations on your awesome GMAT score.

I'm currently a Tax accountant at a Big 4, and while I have not enrolled in an MBA program/began a post/MBA career, I thought I might share some of my experiences about my industry and why an MBA.

From my observation, most people who start off in my company usually end up leaving, with maybe half doing something completely non-tax related. Some people leave for a JD or MBA, others do something else professional-services related, while the rest settle down into a tax accounting career in industry. I think that while the technical knowledge you'll learn from your job won't transfer too greatly to other career paths, the work experience itself of learning and growing in a profession, working with people (hopefully in a leadership capacity), and performing well relative to your peers are all pretty neat things to gain from this career path, or any career path, really. What I am trying to say is, since you are pretty young, if tax intially interests you, why not? Plenty of people leave tax to do something else, and in the first few years of your career, it's more about you learning to become the best professional/workplace leader/employee that you can be, not necessarily acquiring all the technical knowledge applicable to your field.

It seems that you have a few options; I say just go for the job, kick major butt, and then after 2-3 years, you'll probably have a better sense of what you'd like to do - I don't believe that you will feel "stuck". Using me as an example, I have been employed for a little over 2 years, (with Masters in Tax and CPA), yet I feel no regrets in pursuing a completely new and unrelated career path post-MBA (non-profit) - I am glad to have had the experience I've enjoyed, and feel like I've grown and learned much about myself as a person and as a professional in the past few years.

I hope this helped, and I wish you the best of luck in whichever path you decide to take in the future!