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Every MBA program will hit you with the same sampling of core subjects: Marketing, Finance, Stats, Economics, Accounting, Operations, Strategy and Organizational Behavior.  The names might change slightly but in some form you will have to address each of these topics.

Marketing has math in it?

For a lot of people marketing and advertising are synonymous, but in practice they are not.  Marketing branched off from economics and while it does examine advertising as a small component of an overall picture, you will not be working on story boards for ad campaigns.  The marketing classes at business school will focus on the Four P’s (Product, Price, Place and Promotion), the three C’s (the corporation itself, the customer, and the competition) the Bass diffusion model and conjoint analysis.  For a sneak peek at marketing, think about what the graph would look like (with time on the X-axis and users on the Y-axis) for a couple different products (microwaves, the internet and facebook maybe).  Do some take longer to get popular?  Do some depend on a minimum number of users to become viable and then surge in usage?  Are there stages?

Will this help me Finance my education?

Finance is a key concept to understand during and after business school.  Both corporate and market finance will be a major building block for a lot of your future classes as well as careers in finance, consulting, CPG or even start-ups.  The major take away from corporate finance will be NPV calculations and a major concept of market finance will be the minimum variance portfolio.   For a sneak peek at corporate finance check out my article on NPV analysis and for market finance try to think about investing in multiple stocks with different expected returns.  If you set your goal, which you should, at getting the highest return for the lowest risk, how do you go about calculating that?

What is a debit and a credit?

This should be an easy class because it is basically addition and subtraction surrounded by a handful of new vocabulary words, but once the debits and credits start flying even Ivy League engineers get confused.  This class starts with the basics of the three (or four) common financial reports: cash flow statement, balance statement and profit and loss statement (also shareholders equity statement).  These are the reports you will see if you read any public company 10-K or 10-Q.  It is vital that you graduate understanding the components of each.  Much less important, but much more confusing is the debits and credits portion of this class.  Accountants, because they don’t have a lot of excitement, created this system which in my opinion only serves to confuse the layman.  For your accounting sneak peek, a debit transaction indicates an asset or an expense transaction, a credit indicates a transaction that will cause a liability or a gain. If that is confusing keep reading as a debit transaction can also be used to reduce a credit balance or increase a debit balance. A credit transaction can be used to decrease a debit balance or increase a credit balance.  Just memorize it, take the test and forget it.  Kind of like the GMAT.

What is the marginal cost of skipping this class?

Economics is the most theoretical of all the business school core classes in my opinion.  That is not to suggest that the concepts you learn are not extremely valuable to both running and understanding businesses.  This class will most likely cover consumer surplus, marginal revenue, cost and profit, minimum efficiency scales and general economic theories.  If you want a sneak peek into the type of thinking you will do in this class the recent US health care rules are a great example.  If you mandate that people cannot be denied coverage for insurance due to pre-existing conditions (in other words you control the price at which an insurance company can sell a product) what is the logical response of the companies in this market place?  Secondly, if you also mandate that the consumer must purchase said product, how will this change incentives and supply?