[Program Fitting]IESE & Georgetown MBA

Question:
Hello everyone,
I would love to have your advices on my school choosing. I am admitted by IESE and Georgetown. It is a hard decision for me to choose the right school between IESE Business school (Spain, ranked #11 globally & #5 in Europe by Financial Times.) & Georgetown McDonough Business School (US, ranked #38 globally & #19 in US by Financial Times.) I took all of my efforts to apply both of them and now I suffer to give up anyone. I love to study in US but I can't ignore the future niche strength if I study in the prestigious Spanish bilingual MBA, on the other hand, I believe the fact of location is everything so that studying in US, in DC, will help me to broaden my life experiences. If it’s available, I would like to have your and advices from an objective prospective, please kindly share your thoughts and I would be more than happy to have your advices. Thank you so much and may all the best be with you.

Answer:
It's a critical decision since it's not only about the curriculum and rankings
but about the whole learning environment, culture, community...everything
and the outcome you're aiming at for your career

personally I studied in Europe before so I can share with you that it's a totally different planet there
economy, culture, business environment, legal structure, languages, value system, holidays, union system, recruiting process, people...etc.
especially you're going to study business, it's a big trade-off decision you'll have to make
I have friend study in IESE now, you may probably get more understanding about the school and the environment there

In terms of ranking, IESE is higher, one reason is the curriculum is more sophisticated than in Georgetown McDonough,
but not much since McDonough is also quite competitive on program design and the well-roundness. It seems IESE has a big bet on case studies that may affect in learning process, but it depends on how you value this approach for your study.

generally the curriculum itself now only plays a small part
since too many issues you need to juggle
although Spanish is quite a useful tool
it really depends on your future career, your learning capacity on language, and which part of world will you spend mostly on your career
you can have a general understanding about Spanish, but quite hardly to learn a fluent Spanish in a 2-year study
since most of your time will be dedicated in English
and your study quality on MBA might decrease too since you need to spend time on another language

for the rest are mostly outside the school
the business environment is almost upside down from in the U.S.
Fortune 1000 are mostly in the U.S.
and you'll see only rare global companies in the Europe but they're dominating the market
the most likely reason they are not that large in global scale but can avoid the U.S. competition
is due to the extremely complicated political economy environment in Europe as a whole
that the U.S. companies are reluctant to enter with such complex accommodation process
it'll be a very strange but cool experience
and that's another privilege to study in the U.S.
you're learning not only from the classes but from your live observation

feel free to shoot me email if you have questions