Well, it seems that you are facing the engineer’s dilemma
Now there is a lot of difference between both the degrees in terms of curriculum, job profiles and eligibility.
Let me help you to tackle this in the simplest manner possible.
You have mentioned that you come from a tech. background and want to get a managerial edge.
The key question is - Do you want to STAY in the technical sector?
MEM is meant for people who have a strong engineering background and want to stay in the technical industry. Being a specialized masters program, MEM can be taken up by recent graduates as well as people with work experience.
MBA, on the other hand, is meant for senior professionals from both technical and non-technical backgrounds (with a minimum of 3 to 5 years of work ex) , who want to get into want to get into core business fields like operations, management consulting, marketing, finance, investment banking,etc.
This would reflect on the curriculum as well. While the MEM curriculum does cover business electives, a major part of it is dedicated to equip students with specific skills in the IT and engineering sector.
MBA, on the other hand, is completely business focussed (Apart from a few programming electives for its analytics modules) and usually uses the case study method as a part of its learning pedagogy.
So, primarily your decision would depend whether you want to stay in the technical sector or invest in a few years of work experience and eventually switch to business.
For both MBA and MEM,almost all of the major schools require a GMAT/GRE score. A GMAT of 700+ and a GRE 320+ is considered to be competitive.
Regarding the best schools that you can target, MEM is mostly a US Concept so the best place to pursue MEM is USA followed by Canada. MIT, Dartmouth, Duke, University of southern California, McGill, Windsor are some of the top schools you can target for MEM.
You must already know that the Ivy League Schools with the likes of Harvard, Stanford, Princeton are globally recognized for their MBA Programs.
Apart from these, you can look at Kellogg, Duke, LBS, Queen's University, HEC Paris and NUS.
In case you want to check out a comprehensive analysis of MBA V/S MEM, visit this link:
https://www.mim-essay.com/masters-in-en ... in-canada/Hope this answer helped, good luck!
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Abhyank Srinet
Founder & CEO
(MiM-Essay)