OT Docs- MBA dual degree advice needed.

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how hard were the classes? I

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Not hard, just time consuming. If you have an undergrad business degree, you'll be familiar with almost everything, just greater detail. If not, it will take a little while to get up to speed. I didn't actually learn anything I thought was useful. If I had to do it again I'd get a MS in finance or econ.

ETA, I'm not a doc.

MD/MBA? If it's at a badass university like Notre Dame, Harvard, or Stanford, then maybe it's worth it.

That's how you get into the White House, brah.

Sets someone up extremely well to be a Chief Medical Officer one day.

I only know about the medical side of things, as I have never taken a single business class.

I will say that if you look at various institution's websites, some Deans of various med schools have both an MD and a MBA. So I guess it must have some value as far as academic leadership positions.

MBA's value for you would probably be confined to learning things you hadn't been exposed to before. Yes you can learn econ, accounting, and finance on your own through self education but this would force you to learn the fundamentals. The other aspect of it that people value, networking/job placement probably doesn't matter to you at all, so factor that in. I have no idea if an MBA would help give you clout if you wanted to be one of the people running a clinic, but hard to imagine a lot of necessity in doing a bunch of stupid case studies on Harley Davidson and Virgin.

Eta: I am not an OT doc but know about business school

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having the degree

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I think that's the key, a lot of things that you can learn on your own but aren't able to implement them professionally because of the lack of certification/credentials,etc., it was just a playful dig anyway

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My company is paying for half of mine and it's not too expensive anyway (state school).

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You're doing it right. Have someone else pay for it and it's actually worth it.

Doing an MBA now and have several friends doing MD/MBA, one that was previously practicing now doing an MBA, and a few that started doing the MBA right after Med School (which was silly because they are doing it at the same university, thus 6 years vs 5 for the MD/MBA).

With the exception of 1 of the MD/MBAs none of them will practice. Most are going into finance, consulting, or health care strategy/ops. They all plan to focus on health care though.

IMO, if you can do the dual degree option in 5yrs and don't mind the extra year and costs, it could be worth it to do. It seems their are a lot of doctors out there that really don't understand the business/operations/finance side very well. To make the big money now, it seems you would eventually need to open your own practices/invest, so having a strong business acumen would serve you well. Also opens the door to doing CEO/exec roles at a healthcare company eventually.

*In full disclosure, this is at a university with both a top 5 business school and top 5 med school.

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I work with a physician who got an MD and an MBA from Duke (it wasn't a dual program, he just did both at the same time). He regrets the MBA component and says it just got him a huge sum in student loan debt and he could have learned everything he learned in business school for free on his own.

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It's useless if all he does is practice medicine. Maybe it's not so useless when you use it to create a multi-million dollar business.

Do you know who make the best clients for lawyers? Doctors. Because they make a frickton of money and get into ridiculous business deals and don't know how to protect themselves.