Column by BusinessWeeks Phil Mintz: MBA Education: Too much stress?

While the experiences they describe all vary widely, theres one constant theme that seems to run through most, if not all of them stress.

That business school is stressful should not be surprising. After all, most students have given up good-paying jobs and fancy titles for a year or two of high-pressure learning, competing with other high-performing students for internships, jobs and in competitions. At the end, many students are saddled with a lot of debt that only a high-paying post-MBA job can erase. Plus, if a student has a family and children, the pressures can be enormous.
For international students, stress can take on added dimensions. A study of a group of international students in a UK masters programpublished last fall in the Journal of Studies in International Education found that stress was caused by several factors including academic cultural differences and language ability. The study found that stress was intense at the start of the academic program, and gradually declined only as the workload got easier.
At the University of North Carolinas Kenan-Flagler Business School, international students encounter stress because of their concerns about comprehension and language fluency issues, says Tim Flood, an assistant professor of management communications who conducts programs designed to make international students comfortable in the business school culture.

They have perfectly fine fluency levels in English, but they register the language through all these filters. If they hear a joke, they wonder, Whats the meaning of the joke, Flood said. I have to explain the larger cultural stuff that supposedly makes the joke funny.

This isnt to say that business school should be stress-free. As mental health experts note, a little bit of stress can be exciting, and a life without stress can be boring. But too much stress can bring on all sorts of health problems, including obesity, heart disease, and depression.

Still, kept under control, stress is good training for life, post-MBA. As Kenan-Flaglers Flood said: The stress level the students feel in the first half of first year is nearly overwhelming, but its not. It really braces them for the challenges ahead. Theyve made it.

Phil Mintz is the B-Schools Channel Editor for BusinessWeek.com in New York. He writes an exclusive regular column for MBAUniverse.com. Mintz can be reached at [email protected]