People need to stop saying ‘B School is Preschool’

It’s time to get down to business and set the record straight once and for all

Whoever came up with the idea that B school is preschool, we need to have a chat. You’re very wrong. Maybe you need some convincing.

Fortunately, this B school student knows how to be persuasive.

The workload is deceptively intense

The assumption probably originated around our smaller amount of nightly homework. Instead, we have lurking assignments, those that are due two weeks from the day they’re assigned. There are also unassigned or ungraded homework that students work on a little each night, or don’t do at all, making it appear to the observer that there’s never any work to do. The assignments that take place over a long period of time are usually the most time consuming and the most stressful like problem sets or Case Competitions.

Problem sets are seen across all the schools, but the ones at the B school hardly seem to get mentioned, probably because people repress them. They use one concept from class that took five minutes to explain and turn it into a six-part problem no one can do. They make up close to half of the homework grade and they are assigned about a week and a half before the actual due date, which means no one ever does them until the night before they’re due.

This is a terrible mistake. If you’re a student with good time management, these daunting assignments end up being quite easily accomplished if you work on a problem each night. But for everyone else, buckle up, because it’s going to be rough.

Now Case Comps are the scariest things you’ll ever do in the B school, and they’re by far the most time consuming of all assignments. The first day of class, you’re introduced to these monsters. But you have no idea what the topic is going to be and it just hangs over your head as the reveal slowly crawls closer.

Your Case Comp becomes your significant other. You end up spending so much time on it that it could be considered a civil union. Case Comps are one of the few reasons people think the B school is difficult just by the way it affects people. Entering into the B school around Case Comp time is like stepping into a scene from The Walking Dead. Everyone is so sleep deprived and half bald from stress. Some groups actually hope to not get into finals because it becomes even more time consuming and the judges become more important and scary, like former Monsanto CEO Dick Mahoney.

Professor Kimball Chapman getting hydrated before an intense accounting class

The environment is competitive in just about every way

If your preschool was competitive, then B school is the place for you. If you’re like the majority of people, preschool was not competitive — except when it came to getting the best crayons. In B school, everyone needs to be better than everyone else in either their social life or personal wealth or how many businesses they’ve already founded. It’s good for a bit because it forces everyone to work hard. After a while it is so exhausting it makes me wish nap time were a thing.

Preschoolers don’t have to deal with bullshit stereotypes

Preschool has no stereotype that you’re either trying to break or fit into. Fighting the stereotype of the B school is the worst part of being in the B school. Lots of people expect the douche-look. People assume the students aren’t the smartest bunch and are just taking business classes because they’re the easiest.

Wrong. Yes, some people have that style, but it isn’t all of us. And the classes aren’t something most people can sleep through. The classes are not easy at all. The material is not easy at all. The work is not easy at all.

B school is not preschool.

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