The One-Year MBA at Copenhagen Business School: My Personal Journey

Marian Reed

The Scandinavian winter has come and gone and spring cleaning is in full swing. A useful way to refresh your mind and spirit, post-vernal equinox, is to refocus on where you are and why you are there. For me, the why has not changed, but I am mentally in a much different ‘place’ than I was a couple of months ago.

The pursuit of a one-year MBA at Copenhagen Business School has been a goal of mine for a few years and I am still greatly satisfied that I have started this new phase of my life. As for the where I am in this MBA process, I am pleasantly not where I expected to be. I am hesitant to give away one of the surprises I have encountered as I do not want to take the mystery out of the process. But that’s just it – there is in fact mystery to the process! Those who would like the entire MBA experience to be a surprise would do well to stop reading, but those who persevere will hopefully be rewarded with some motivating insight.

The one-year MBA experience

Value does not lay solely with the coursework or the final degree; a large part of the one-year MBA experience’s value is the process itself. For me, the piece that holds the greatest value is also the most surprising part of the process – you are pushed to explore your notions of trust. You are pushed to place trust in your classmates, in your professors, in yourself and most importantly, you are encouraged to trust in the process. A year ago, I would not have believed that my sense of self would be engaged by the process; I naively thought my analytical mind would bear the brunt of the workload of my MBA experience. This is not true – you instead have the opportunity to delve past the superficial into your innermost depths and once there, you can reshape and improve your core. The Copenhagen Business School MBA process gives you the opportunity to improve your fundamental self, and this opportunity should be embraced and explored.

The One-Year MBA at Copenhagen Business School Enables Discovery

Due to the fact that Copenhagen Business School has a one-year MBA program, the core courses come fast and furious. The journey, until recently, was a high-powered sprint and we have reached the far turn on the track. The core segment of the one year MBA program is now complete, and electives and a multi-month Integrated Strategy Project (ISP) are just commencing. It is a natural time to break from the routine and reflect. In general, I am not one for moving with the prevailing tides; I prefer to fight the currents and carve out my own path. However, despite any amount of independent spirit, the external environment will still influence where you step and how you grow. Deciding where you spend your MBA experience is a much more interesting and influential decision than you may have thought.

Stepping out of Your Comfort Zone

There are some potential blocks to absorbing the full benefits of the MBA experience. To create an analogy from my dim, dark, trigonometric past, you and your peers will always run on sine and cosine wavelengths and will rarely be in complete synch. This incongruity is a fact of life, pre, intra and post-MBA. But Copenhagen Business School will not let you avoid the process and you will have to step out of your comfort zone to complete the MBA journey. The full benefits of the process will come to you if you are willing to make small sacrifices to achieve greater gains. Trust is critically important to the process, and you may be impressed by how much trust you possess.

Songs that helped to inspire this post: I Want to Conquer the World, Bad Religion; Higher Ground, Stevie Wonder; Don’t Give Up on Me, Solomon Burke

About Marian Reed

Marian hails from Philadelphia, USA and spent the last 12 years of her life working for the Linguistic Data Consortium, an organization that supports human language technology (HLT) development. She has a background in marketing and has helped to direct, formulate and enact strategic marketing goals in a highly diversified, niche market. She is currently an MBA candidate at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). You can contact Marian in the comments section below, where she will be happy to advise members of the TopMBA.com community on MBA program selection, the application processes and how to prepare for the MBA journey.

Marian has personal interests in food production, the seafood industry and astronomy and spends a large portion of her free time traveling, networking, cooking, reading and/or writing.