Meghan O’Neill, MBA ’09, Georgetown McDonough School of Business: It is a lot easier to get a job in the area where you go to school.

Mia Saini: Welcome to MBA PodTV. I’m your host Mia Saini. Today I’m excited to bring you special coverage of a Forte Foundation MBA alumni panel held here in Washington, D.C.

Forte Forum events, which are organized by the Forte Foundation, provide opportunities for potential MBA students to learn about business schools and careers in business. Topics of the panel include what to consider when a choosing a business school, when it’s appropriate to pursue joint degrees, as well as the importance of utilizing your networks. The panelists are Erica Lubensky an Alumni of the Ross School Business. She’s chief-of-staff at a nonprofit called Women for Women International. Meghan O’Neill is a recent graduate of Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. She’s now a program manager at AOL. Prior to business school Meghan worked at Google. Bridget Venne has an MBA and Masters of City and Regional Planning from Kenan-Flagler Business School. She’s a Senior Consultant at Deloitte. And last Dana Scherer is a Columbia Business School Alumni and is a policy analyst with the Federal Communications Commission.

Kathryn: Hi good evening my name is Kathryn. I’m just beginning the process of choosing an institution and it can be a little overwhelming. And I was wondering in your opinion what are the top two to three things that myself and the rest of us should be looking at in terms of choosing an institution?

Meghan O’Neill, MBA ’09, Georgetown McDonough School of Business: I would say people is absolutely hands down. It was number one for me. The best advice I was given is to go to those schools and meet with the people. You have no idea if you’re going to really mesh with the type of people at the different schools. Obviously like every school has a pretty broad array and a diverse student body, but you really want to make sure that you feel like one of them and you feel like you can learn with these people and you can learn from these people. I think people are very instrumental.

I think my other top one would be location. And I say this with a caveat because I’m from the West coast and I thought I always wanted to go back to the West coast and I went to Georgetown. And I do think that it is a lot easier ? and I’m very blunt about these questions, so I’m going to say the honest answer. It is a lot easier to get a job in the area where you go to school. And I’m not saying it’s not possible to get a job where you don’t go to school. I had a ton of interviews in San Francisco this past year on my second year because I thought I wanted to go back there. So it could happen, I just had to be extremely diligent because you have to make sure that you have a network in those cities at the school where you’re at. So I think that location does matter.

Erica Lubensky, MBA ’04, University of Michigan Ross School of Business: I think the top two things are what do you want and what do you see you’re going to get out of the experience from the school. And really think that there’s so much value to really thinking and inspecting and looking into your soul and your heart, and seeing what you want out of the experience and be very, very clear about it. You may not have the crystal ball to say 10 years from now I’m going to be x but you know what skills you want to build. You know the type of person you are. You know the environment in which you thrive and really look at that and look at the environment that you offer. Visit the schools, look around, and then move forward from that.

And I do have to add I went to Michigan and I well actually disagree with the fact of location because there are plenty of business schools that have very large programs that have lots and lots of alumni all over the world. So, there are lot of people, especially I’ve seen in D.C. here that want to stay in the area because they want to work in the area. Look around and expand your horizons. And talk with people and figure out where you want to go from there.

Mary: Hi my name is Mary. I have a question. There’s a lot of talk of networking here. I was just wondering how much you attribute your success to your school’s network versus a learned skill set that you learn there that you would not have otherwise?

Bridget Venne, MBA, MA ’08, Kenan-Flagler Business School, UNC Chapel Hill: I would say it was probably about 50/50. My school has a very good relationship with my company. And they tend to come on campus a lot and they do a fair amount of their interview slots there. So I was able to get into that interview with this particular company and I think the school somewhat contributed to that. However, I know once I got in that door that was being able to excel at that interview and being able to show them that I belong at this company both intellectually and sort of culturally that was both me and the things that I learned while I was in school.

Meghan O’Neill, MBA ’09, Georgetown McDonough School of Business: Well I got my position now at AOL, I didn’t go back to Google. I’m a trader and I went over to AOL. It’s here outside of D.C. in Dallas. But I took a couple of marketing classes at Georgetown and there’s a really good marketing professor there and he had a Georgetown alumni working at AOL that asked him to give him some names of people that might be good for this position and he gave the guy one name. And I think obviously that’s ?cause I had, you know, advertising experience at Google.

So I got the position, one because a Georgetown alumni came back to a professor and the professor reached out to me. Getting your MBA is one I don’t think prior to MBA you realize the importance of your network and don’t realize that you really at every opportunity should try to build that up. But being at business school I just really push on you that it’s so important and you never know what’s going to happen. Do pay attention once in one of your classes, your professor remembers you and you get hooked up with a great position.

Kristen: Hi my name is Kristen. I’m wondering how much I should consider brand equity as part of my decision making process?

Dana Scherer, MBA Columbia Business School: Again I guess it just depends on what it is that you want to do. When I was at the FCC I noticed that the MBAs really seemed to only come from very few schools and somehow I had got in my head that I want to go to one of those schools too without really thinking about what it meant in other fields. So I think it just kind of depends on what field you’re going into. You know we’re not supposed to like pump up our school seat. So I’m trying to be cautious but again just everything else, I think it depends. It does help. I mean the fact that I went to a school that had not only a good reputation for its business school but also its law school and some of the other schools that it just helps me network not just with people who went to business schools but to other aspects of the university as well.

Hilary: Hi my name is Hilary Krichly and I’m wondering about ?especially in this economy where maybe Meghan you graduated most recently. There seems to be this trend of doing joint programs. I have a specific interest in healthcare so it’s like a Master’s of Public Policy or Public Health or even like a PhD in Health Economics, etc. So I was just wondering about like your competitiveness when applying for certain positions and if any of you have insight into that world, what that looks like and what you think about the value and tradeoff of maybe specializing more than doing like a broader management degree?

Meghan O’Neill, MBA ’09, Georgetown McDonough School of Business: One, if the interest level is there for you to do a joint degree it only helps you, absolutely it only helps you. I have a bunch of friends that did MSFS which is Master’s in Foreign Service and their MBA at Georgetown like Public Policy and their MBA, JD MBA that type of stuff, MD MBA. I mean their lives are different than the people that are in the full time. You know you go a year to get your MBA and then you take a year and you do your MSFS or Public Policy and then you go back to do your MBA. So you’re like not in the same classes as the people you knew. That’s kind of how that happened. That’s not how it happens everywhere but that’s how it happened at my school. But I think absolutely if you are interested in both things, I think it would extremely help and you’ll be way more competitive in the workforce ?cause you just have that much more experience.

Bridget Venne, MBA, MA ’08, Kenan-Flagler Business School, UNC Chapel Hill: I would say there would be two ways that it would really benefit you. If there is something very specific that you think you want to do that’s at the intersection of those two degrees, you’re of course more qualified than many other candidates.

But the other piece I would say that maybe more long term is because you’re at the school longer you actually build up a greater network. I came in and did my business degree first so I sort of considered myself part of the class of 2007 even though I didn’t graduate until 2008. And so now I have 300 other people in the workplace that are about a year ahead of me that I can bounce things off of and are just giant part of my part of my network

I have people that just graduated that I can talk with about those sorts of things and of course the class I graduated with. So I think there’s a benefit to that too. The only thing I would say is sometimes it does make you a little bit specialized. I know when I was trying to talk to people about going into consulting they were, ?Well but you have this planning degree.? I was, well there are two reasons. One, I may want to do consulting for cities in the future and two candidly, I need another year to figure things out at the time. So that was another benefit to me which hopefully you will not need to use.

Dana Scherer, MBA Columbia Business School: I won’t speak specifically to that but just general advice is that don’t take anybody else’s word for it. Like talk to the people that are doing what you want to do because they may have totally different advice than we do. So that’s one of the lessons I kind of learned the hard way. I thought that this one person like had the answer for everything and some people may want you to think that. They may sell books about that, but I think the best course of action generally is to try to figure out to the extent that you can what you want to do and talk to people actually doing it and get their advice.

Female Voice: Well I just want to thank our panelists for sharing a wealth of knowledge and their honesty with regards to all these questions that we’re answered. So join in, give them a hand.

Mia Saini: Well, that’s it for this edition of MBA PodTV. I’m your host, Mia Saini. Visit us at MBAPodcaster.com to download the latest audio and video shows and of course joins us on Facebook and Twitter to get the latest news and insight into your MBA application process.