5 Reasons Liberal Arts Students are a Perfect Fit for an MBA

Recently I  have been thinking about how my liberal arts undergraduate education has impacted my professional and graduate school careers. Most of my peers from my beloved undergrad institution, Swarthmore College, have gone on to do J.D.’s, Ph.D’s and M.D.’s, while some like me have dived into the business world and business school. I was curious to hear about the experiences of my liberal arts peers at MIT Sloan, so I brought them together (in a pre-social distancing era) for a dinner discussion called LibNight on the liberal arts and b-school. Here are five things we all took away from our liberal arts experience that has helped us excel in business school:

1. Our ability to think critically and work in an interdisciplinary manner, which is the cornerstone of a liberal arts education, is an incredible asset we bring to the MBA experience.

Business in itself is an interdisciplinary field. One day you could be discussing a human resources problem at a software technology company and the next day you could be discussing an operational issue at an automobile factory. Going into Sloan, I felt comfortable switching between these disparate topics and industries in part because of the interdisciplinary nature of my Swarthmore education. In a single semester I was taking an economics class, a statistics class, an English literature class and a sociology class, so needless to say I had gotten used to talking about supply and demand in the morning and colonization in the afternoon.

I learned how to apply a particular framework from one class to enhance my knowledge in another class. This ability to constantly draw interdisciplinary connections has proven to be a large advantage in an MBA environment where we are constantly drawing connections between topics. For instance, in my corporate finance class last week, we were easily able to synthesize concepts from accounting, macroeconomics, operations, sociology, and other fields to discuss the multifaceted aspects of a single case.

2. Learning how to articulate our ideas out loud in our small liberal arts classes helps move the discussion forward in our MBA programs.

My Sloan experience is filled with classes that involve active participation. We discuss case studies, questioning decisions that their protagonists make, and articulating how they may have handled things differently. In these 80-person classes, I feel comfortable speaking out because I learned how to articulate my ideas as a liberal arts undergrad -my 8 to 15 person classes ensured there was no hiding, after all. At LibNight, my Sloan classmates agreed that they too felt comfortable raising their hand in class because they had experience forming opinions and saying them out loud from their undergraduate years.

3. We are willing to dig deeper to question underlying assumptions bringing in innovation and creativity.

The other side of the coin when learning how to articulate opinions is to learn how to ask questions. Sometimes these inquiries are in service of questioning underlying assumptions and sometimes they are simply to clarify existing information. In my undergrad, small classes bred intimate learning environments, where my ideas were challenged and where I learned to question my peers’ ideas. My critical thinking abilities were put to the test and sharpened through my peers’ active participation. Similarly, at LibNight, my classmates also talked about how their ability to question allowed them to gather insight from ambiguity. One of our participants talked about how this ability had helped her with her entrepreneurship. She went into the startup world without any expertise in the content material, but she was able to get up to speed quickly by knowing how to ask the right questions. For instance, she leaned on her liberal arts training when doing customer interviews to understand customers’ problems.

4. The writing skills that we learn at a liberal arts institution serve us well throughout the MBA and in our professional lives.

I produce fewer academic papers at Sloan than I did in undergrad, however, I arguably write more words in total. I write cover letters, case write ups, Whatsapp messages (SO MANY of these), emails and the occasional blog post. My writing skills that I honed at Swarthmore have been an asset that I carry throughout business school at MIT and beyond. While writing may be considered a technical skill, I have found that it lies at the heart of communication and connection, which is the bread and butter of any MBA experience.

5. The peers that I formed a tight knit community with from my undergrad are now all in diverse fields, and I so value their perspective as we delve deeper in the fields we have chosen to specialize in.

My closest friends from undergrad are all in fields that are very different from mine. They are lawyers at a district court, a communications director in congress, a Japan studies Ph.D, an investigative journalist, a federal auditor, and an artist. They keep me grounded and help me continue to see a world that is beyond my day to day. I value their perspectives greatly and I appreciate being able to see a wider world through their eyes, while maintaining my interdisciplinary connections to the larger liberal arts alumni community.

Many liberal arts grads feel their backgrounds may make them weaker candidates for business school, but at LibNight my classmates and I learned that we all believe the exact opposite. A liberal arts degree can sometimes be frustrating because we’re leaving without a specific “technical” field. However, in the long term, our interdisciplinary liberal arts skills amplify our voices, helping us emerge as leaders in our fields. Pairing the liberal arts degree with business school is a powerful combination that can truly enhance our impact on the world.

Riana Shah, MBA 2020

Riana Shah is a concurrent MBA/MPA Candidate at MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Kennedy School. At Sloan, Riana leads the Entrepreneurship Club, serves on Sloan Senate, and is a Legatum Fellowship for Entrepreneurship.