“Is This Still the Simplest Case?” and Other Stories from My First Two Weeks as an MMBA Student

A lot can happen in two weeks. People meet, fall in love and get married in two weeks. People fall ill and die in two weeks. People can launch a successful startup and secure their first investors in two weeks; others can lose their jobs and find new career opportunities within the same time frame.

I have tried to keep this in mind as I reminisce on my first two weeks as a modular MBA student at the Lagos Business School. I had initially applied to the full-time MBA program and to some extent, I had tried to mentally prepare myself for the rigour of an MBA. When I discovered that the format had been changed to a modular program, I thought that I was in for a somewhat easier journey. I could not have been more wrong. 

Truthfully, the two formats are incomparable to one another. The full-time program would have required sitting through several hours of lectures five days a week while the modular program features only 75 minutes of class on three weekdays and about 4 hours of class on Saturday. Still, what the MMBA lacks in class hours, it makes up for in assignments, readings, and now, blogging. This makes it feel, on some days, less lightweight and more full-time. 

The title for this piece was coined from a comment I made in one of my classes in the past week. Analysis of Business Problems is perhaps my favourite course as I find it very mind-engaging. It is, however, easy to see why some other students may touch it with a long spoon. On the day in question, the facilitator, Dr Yetude Anibaba had given us a case to study ahead of the class. We had studied it in my group and put our notes in a Word document; I had thought that was all there was to it and had been eager to share my thoughts in the class. 

Imagine my surprise then, when she asked us to present group by group and the first group made their presentation with an Excel sheet showing a financial breakdown of the costs identified in the case. I wondered for a moment if there had been a separate instruction to do this. I spent the next 20 minutes of the class trying to tidy up the notes for our group so we could have something to present. Thankfully, someone had also done an Excel breakdown, and fate being on our side, we presented last. It went better than I thought, although I wasn’t as talkative as I had planned to be because Dr Anibaba simply kept unravelling parts of the case that we hadn’t even considered. 

At the beginning of the class, she mentioned that the particular case study was the simplest of all the cases we had this semester. Toward the end of the class, I posted a comment in the Zoom chat room that I am sure echoed the thoughts of most people. “Is this still the simplest case?” I had posted, drawing laughter from everyone. 

Tomorrow marks the start of a new week, and I have a fair share of assignments, reading materials, group meetings, and potential club interactions to sort through. I remember strongly believing that the MMBA program may pale in comparison to the full-time program in terms of quality, as I could not see how 30 hours of in-person classes per week could be crammed into four hours a week, even with the one intensive week every three months. Two weeks later, I still hold that opinion, but certainly not as strongly.