MBA Handicapping: An MBA For This Concert Pianist?

There are nontraditional MBA students and then there are really nontraditional MBAs. Samuel Deason falls in the latter category. He’s a 31-year-old prize-winning concert pianist who has performed in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Austria, Armenia, Spain, Canada, and Italy. You can hear him play Rachmaninoff’s Etude-Tableaux Op.39 No.6.

He’s never really held a business job in his life. His favorite work to play because, he reveals, he is a “little bit of a masochist, is Beethoven’s challenging Diabelli Variations. He’s currently an instructor at the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University where he earned his Doctor of Musical Arts last year. It is his third degree after a master’s in piano performance from Johns Hopkins University in 2017 and a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from the School at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto in 2014.

He’s co-founded three concert series in Canada and the U.S., served as a judge in music festivals across Canada and is part-owner of a 35-acre commercial development adjacent to Saskatoon in Canada. He is also a host of Classical and Beyond for a Chicago radio station.

What in the world will he do with an MBA? Samuel is keenly interested in entrepreneurship, arts management, and real estate. With a GRE of 319 and graduate GPAs of 3.9 and 3.8, he’s applying to the Kellogg School of Management, HEC Paris and Sungkyunkwan University’s Graduate School of Business in South Korea (his girlfriend is Korean).

In this episode of Friday’s With Sandy, HBSGuru. com Founder Sandy Kreisberg handicaps his odds and suggests at least one other school to which Samuel should apply.

If you would like to participate in a future Friday’s With Sandy webinar, you can contact Sandy and P&Q Founder John A Byrne here.