MBA Admissions Consultant
Joined: 26 Dec 2008
Posts: 2457
Given Kudos: 2
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Re: Job selection
[#permalink]
25 Jan 2009, 11:10
It won't really matter if you're planning on switching to a business career, because a "business job" isn't a natural progression from a technical position, but a pretty clean break especially if they are the kinds of jobs that MBAs would get at the tech companies.
It's sort of like asking "what are the tradeoffs between doing radiology vs. endocrinology if I want to eventually become a hospital administrator?"
As for b-school admissions, it won't really matter either. In your case, it's very clear that you're analytically smart - but that doesn't necessarily play against the engineering stereotype (i.e. you're not telling them something they don't know about engineers that they're good at numbers). What isn't as obvious is whether you have strong interpersonal skills - which is something you will really need to focus on after college - either on the job, or in your extracurriculars.
If you are really trying to position yourself for a business career down the road, take the job that will give you more opportunities to interact and work in teams (i.e. the less solitary job). This might mean taking the less technical job (whichever one that is).
It's one of the reasons why I found historically that the "old school" engineers working as civil engineers, manufacturing, oil&gas, auto, etc. tend to have a bit more success in b-school admissions - part of it is because there's less of them, but also the nature of their work involves working closely with a wide variety of people (from the riggers, factory workers, etc. to executive mgmt) - and in some cases supervising teams (part of this is also driven by the nature of the businesses themselves - they are driven more by execution than by technical innovation).