There are many pathways to an MBA. In our newest series, ‘My MetroMBA,’ we take a deeper look at what drives MBA students and how they joined their schools.
Overlooking the pristine Pacific Ocean, the campus of Pepperdine University can be impossibly alluring, even from across the country. For second-year MBA student Michael Henry, it wasn’t the only factor that ultimately led him to Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, but it was a big one.
A New York native, Henry earned his undergraduate degree in international business and management from Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA—a location he dubbed “close enough to home but just far enough away.” While earning his bachelor’s, Henry took time to study abroad, traveling to Cameroon and Mexico, as well as New Orleans back in the States. The itch to take his studies further also became part of the equation, eventually leading him to the opposite side of the U.S. to attend Graziadio.
“Pepperdine allowed me to expand my network with west coast and Asia,” Henry says. “I was also very specific on the location of my business school—it needed to encompass the areas of my life that I value, such as health and fitness, the beach and the ocean.”
Henry, 31, notes that a huge difference between starting the first and second year of an MBA program is how quickly the second year can come up.
“You’ll likely be doing a demanding internship, but carve out time to network and plan ahead,” he advises. “Things to keep in mind are which companies do you want to recruit [at] for full-time offers (if you do not get an offer from your internship or if you choose not to return) and what are the opportunities to get in front of them, how many extracurricular clubs do you realistically need to be involved in and [you] have time for, and—now that your program is almost over— who are the key relationships you want to fortify before you go your separate ways. Business school has a lot to do with relationships.”
After jumping from a non-profit job into the corporate world, Henry hopes to take his future MBA into a development program in sales.
“I’m excited by the opportunity to harness my people skills to drive sales for an organization,” he says. “Five years from now I expect to have successfully completed the leadership development program and [been] promoted into a higher management position leading teams, hopefully working in the digital marketing arena.”
Information for the Graziadio MBA can be found here. The school’s Online MBA was recently ranked as the 18th best online MBA in the U.S. by the Princeton Review.