Tuck ($$) vs. Johnson ($$$$) vs. Booth

Question

Hey y'all,

I'm facing a tough final decision. My post-MBA goal is tech recruiting, specifically Product Management. I'm kind of agnostic as to location. Here's what it's down to:

Johnson:
+ Ithaca is lovely
+ Smaller class size for that strong community feeling. 
+ Full ride fellowship
+ Ivy League (For what it's worth)
+ Tech campus in NYC.
- Not as highly ranked as the other options
- Not sure if I would have some opportunities closed to me vs the other "higher-ranked" options.

Tuck:
+ Hanover is really nice. Both Tuck and Johnson offer this rural setting that I might not be able to live in again any time soon.
+ Really liked the people I met there
+ Ivy League (For what it's worth)
+ Half-ride scholarship
+ Awesome, old-style facilities. 
- Weak network outside the NorthEast, Bay Area, and Seattle.
- Unsure of their tech compatibility.
- Not sure I want to be that isolated for 2 years.

Booth:
+ M7
+ Huge, international network
+ Great center for entrepreneurship and startups
+ Large variety of classes, including classes on AI
+ Living in the midwest sounds better post-MBA than the East Coast
- Hyde Park is just okay compared to Hanover or Ithaca. Not full of mountains and waterfalls.
- No money. Would be full cost.

What do y'all think? Personally, I'm leaning Booth, but both Tuck and Cornell keep giving me reasons to reconsider, especially with this whole COVID thing making me uncertain about finances.

JohnnyBlaze · Answer

Booth or Tuck, forget Johnson.

Booth - Strong school in a great city. Long history of great companies recruiting, will help you get hired in the current downturn. 
Tuck - Strong alumni ties make up for remote location, these alums will help you get hired in the current recession.

Eliminate Johnson - lack of strong recruiting history and weak alumni ties make this one a school to avoid, in a recession the weakest schools are cut first by hiring firms.

JohnJohnJ · Answer

Did you say - Tuck (Good money and good times), what do you mean by good times?

Posted from my mobile device

Wimbledon · Answer

I really meant that I think that skiing and going around the outdoors in the Connecticut River Valley sounds like a pretty good time. I'm big into skiing, and Chicago really can't offer much in the way of that. That's what I meant by good times really.

JohnJohnJ · Answer

Honestly for tech you can go to any school. I moved to a tech company (4 year old company) in the Silicon Valley (but I live in New York) after spending many years in strategy consulting. 
I spend a lot of time in SF, Bay Area.. in the process, I interact with many product managers.

A good 80% of the product managers that I have come across don’t have an MBA and a significant percentage of product managers don’t come from name brand schools. But yes, they made all the right moves to get the product management role.

Now - with limited data to support my argument, I feel that Amazon may be the only one with a large # of product managers with MBA. So now let’s talk about Amazon, historically Amazon would only go to top 10-20 schools to hire product managers, but a few months back they published that starting 2020 they won’t be limiting their hiring only to the top 15-20 schools but they will go to other schools too. 
So having said that, I would think that neither school is better or worse for tech. Tech is unlike consulting or finance - pedigree won’t make a significant difference

Posted from my mobile device

JohnJohnJ · Answer

Here is the link for Amazon’s new PM hiring plan https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/ ... re-schools Posted from my mobile device

wabo22 · Answer

OP--I had this precise same decision to make earlier this year (except no $ at Tuck, though given the full ride at Johnson they did indicate to me I could likely get a partial scholarship if I pushed for it, but I ruled out Tuck for the most part pretty quickly). For me it came down to the pedigree I'd need to break into PE which only Booth could really give me, but for consulting or tech I would have gone to Tuck above the others for the stronger alumni network and awesome experience, in a industry where the brand name of the school doesn't mean quite as much (i.e., less of an elitist field).

Tuck ($$) vs. Johnson ($$$$) vs. Booth

Tuck ($$) vs. Johnson ($$$$) vs. Booth

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