> are there are "hard" skills from an MBA that transfer? You are asking a genuine question that has a lot of backing research. Before I became a Quant, I was a

> are there are "hard" skills from an MBA that transfer? You are asking a genuine question that has a lot of backing research. Before I became a Quant, I was a student at the University of Chicago, getting the Masters in Financial Math. So the professor who taught the Options course at MSFM told us one day - Now I have to teach this same material to the MBA class, but at a 10,000 feet level. One of the students asked him to elaborate. So he says - If you have a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the hardest, then a UChicago Finance PhD is like 100. A UChicago MSFM is about 50. A UChicago MBA is like 10. A regular (non-UChicago) MBA is a 1. More concretely, someone like me, the 50, can put up the Black Scholes on the blackboard from memory. I can derive it, solve it, code it up in C++ and price your options on a real equity & tell you whether you should buy/sell the damn thing. But that's as far as I was taught. The Finance PhD i.e. the 100, can derive and solve not just the BS but a whole family of models - the Heston, Derman, SABR, BDT, HJM, HW etc etc - there's like a dozen of these PDEs & it gets seriously complicated very soon. So supposedly this Finance PhD can do all of that & more. The UChicago MBA, which is the 10, knows Black Scholes, knows what the Greeks are & can eyeball the value of the Greek & tell you whether the option is overpriced or not, but can't derive/solve/code up the PDE. The non-UChicago MBA has heard of something called the Black Scholes but that's about it. Ofcourse that's his opinion & you should take it with a grain of salt. That said, during my time in the investment banking industry, I have worked with a boatload of MBAs, some quants(MSFMs) & a few PhDs - his opinions bore true.