A few days ago I received the letter from the new MBA Director Jochen Runde, the statement from the Committee of Examiners and the Official Transcript confirming I'm an MBA.
I also received my grade for the Individual Project, which I wrote with the title "Innovative approaches to increase revenues for football clubs - Can good business sense make football better?". It was fun, and I got a good grade.
I haven't been writing in the blog for a long time. Partly because I was busy, partly because I don't want to accept the MBA is over. In fact I'm telling myself is not over yet, because Graduation is on the 16th of May 2009.
Now I'm back to work in Sevilla, Spain. I returned to my previous employer, in a different department and possition, but with the same boss. I left that door opened during the whole year and I'm happy to be back.
As you may know I funded my MBA with a Talentia Scholarship which requires you to return to Andalucía or to an Andalusian company abroad for 4 years after the program. Otherwise you have to return the scholarship, which in my case is worth €56k.
At some point I considered the possibility of finding a job in the UK and repay the scholarship, but given the current work market circumstances and my family responsibilities, that soon became an utopia, especially if I wanted to keep my pre-MBA standard of living in the short term.
The MBA is a long term investment, and I think there are at least two ways to ripe benefits from it.
If you are young, single, come from a relatively low income country and are ready to work like crazy for a few years it definitely makes sense to take any MBA job in London and build your career from it.
But if you have a family, your pre-MBA job was already about MBA level, and you don't want to start from scratch again, it also makes sense going back home, either to your old company or another, and use the Cambridge MBA to grow within your network.
I chose option two, and honestly I still don't know if I made the right decision.
Sometimes I think I should have been more ambitious and try a different job, a different company, a different industry. I can't really stand still, I'm an entrepreneur.
But it's not only about me, so when I go back home from work (sometimes as soon as 15.00) and I meet my wife and my kids in the playground near my riverside flat, I realise that -at least for now- I'm in the right place.
But it's not only about me, so when I go back home from work (sometimes as soon as 15.00) and I meet my wife and my kids in the playground near my riverside flat, I realise that -at least for now- I'm in the right place.
