Hi everyone! I am G from China. I really need your help for my future decision. I am sorry for such a long long post.
Currently, I am a Master student in Europe, and before coming to Europe, I worked for a Big 4 accounting firm in China for two years as a audit associate. At first, my plan is to find another job in financial area and continue to working for another 2-3 years and then go to the US for a two-year MBA program in Finance concentration with scholarships.
However, I found that it is very hard for me to land a job in financial area because my acdemic background is not that competitve (bachelor degree in social science from an elite but not a top university). So I decided to pursue a MSF degree first and try to enter a financial sector when coming back to China. And I also decide to pass CFA and CPA no matter how long it will take. My parents have shown great intension to be grandgarents, so I may get married in 2-4 years which makes me have to only consider one-year MBA programs with generous scholarships or online MBA programs. My future career location will be China, and maybe China only.
So here comes the long dilemma.
After learning finance and preparing CFA, I find that actually I can manage to learn finance well by myself with all the materials provided by the university, CFA training institution and Coursera. And I am not interested in other courses in general management, such as Human Resources Management and Operation Management. I would rather study these courses by online learning in Coursera or other MOOCs. I carefully compared the curriculums of several one-year and online MBA programs with what I have in my MSF program and CFA. I don't think there are much new things to learn. Some of them are even quite boring in my eyes (no offense). Anyway, I have thought about four ways for myself:
1. No self-funded MBA. Pursure an online BSc in Mathematics and Economics degree of LSE and focus on professional certificates, like CFA, CPA, FRM, etc.
2. Instead of a MBA, pursue an online LLM degree in international business law of UCL, and expand my knowledge into legal area and combine finance and law together.
3. A on-campus one-year MBA. But in this case, I have to prepare well to get full-tuition scholarship or at least 70% scholarship, which is hard. I have to take GMAT over and over again until I get 730 or higher.
4. An online MBA. In this case, the "quality-cost ratio" is the problem. The cost of an online MBA is much larger than that of an online BSc or LLM. And many people think that the true value of a MBA program is the chance to network, which an online MBA can hardly offer.
So, what should I do? The time flies quickly, and I really want to make a right decision and stick to it. Thank you for reading such a long question, and please give me a hand.
[Edited by georgedilemma on Jan 21, 2015]
