<p>Let me start off this post by saying that my mind continually adds new thoughts and it seems like I want to do something new with my life everyday. I’m a rising junior in high school so I’ve got plenty of time. With that said, whether or not I want an MBA affects where I decide to go for my undergraduate education so I have a bunch of questions, some of which I will ask in about in this post.</p>
<p>Lets get to the meat of the post. Does undergraduate major really affect your admission into an MBA program or is it all about work experience/test scores/undergraduate grades? </p>
<p>As of 3:00 ET on July 13 2009, there are 2 career paths I am considering. One is just standard accounting. Should I just get an undergraduate business degree for that or would an MBA get me better job opportunities? I think I would be perfectly happy with possible jobs I could land as an accountant but my second career path is more of a dream career path and I want to at least give it a shot.</p>
<p>Another disclaimer before I start off this section of the post. I realize that jobs are VERY limited in this field but if I do go down that road and fail, I will have lots to fall back on. The career path I am talking about is front office sports jobs. What I am looking to do is POTENTIALLY:</p>
<p>Sports management undergrad
2-6 years of sports (business related) work afterwords (amount of time really depends on what jobs are available)
Sports Law program (Marquette is the only one I have come across so far but I haven’t done much research; hoping to find a more prestigious law school with a sports law program)
Top MBA program - specifically MIT. This post by Sakky piqued my interest:</p>
<p>"However, if you mean sports management in the sense of actually figuring out things like draft-choice optimization, selection of players, and that sort of thing, then you want a heavily quant-oriented program. MIT Sloan immediately comes to mind. Perhaps the highest profile MBA graduate in this field is now Daryl Morey, who graduated from Sloan and is the designated future general manager of the Houston Rockets, basically in charge of determining who should be on the Rockets player roster. Morey is also a compatriot of guys like Billy Beane (General Manager of the Oakland A’s) and Bill James (inventor of Sabermetrics)</p>
<p>[Daryl</a> Morey - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Morey]Daryl”>Daryl Morey - Wikipedia)
[Sabermetrics</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics]Sabermetrics”>Sabermetrics - Wikipedia)
<a href=“http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...morey.rockets/[/url]”>http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...morey.rockets/</a></p>
<p>Basically, what these guys do is create mathematical models to determine what player stats translate into wins and then weight them by the kind of salaries the players are getting. When you have a salary cap, like all NBA teams do, or you are working with a constrained budget, like the Oakland A’s are, you have to bring in players that are not only good, but are also cheap. It then becomes quite a analytical job to determine what it really means to be ‘good’, which involves tremendous statistical analyses, which is Sloan’s strong suit.</p>
<p>Other strong quant programs would be Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, Wharton, Purdue, etc. But Sloan is probably the premier one. Depending on the coursework you select, you can basically graduate from Sloan as a “management scientist” who can apply all sorts of mathematical and statistical models to analyze anything."</p>
<p>Afterwords, I will use my connections from undergrad and work experience to get the best job I can in a front office and attempt to work my way up the ranks. Do you see any flaws in this plan? Any comments? I won’t be offended if they are negative or anything like that. As I have already said, this is all preliminary and I’m just trying to gather information. Thanks in advance!</p>