ESADE Business School
speciality: Finance

I don’t recommend doing a master’s or an MBA at all. I don’t know about other programs, but an MBA is better at IESE, and a master’s in finance, in my case, is better than a diploma. You save money and avoid having to do marketing, for example. There are a lot of selfish classmates, and if you don’t come from a middle-class family, they bully you. And on graduation day, if you’re sick, they don’t even mention you. I’ll never take my children to that school. And especially the Basque financial planning teacher, to shake her up. The only one who failed me.

ESADE is an excellent business school, definitely in my opinion in Europe’s top 3. The university success factors are (1) superior career services department (through which I was able to secure a great job in the middle of my first year of my MSc in Finance without having had extensive previous professional experience), (2) diversity and quality of fellow students (having had friends in most European business schools and having shared our different experiences, it seems ESADE offered the best fit for me in terms of people, who are smart, professionally driven yet very social and down to earth/not superficial like those that can be found in other schools), (3) content and work-format (ESADE does not follow a purely academic/theoretical framework but rather incentivises students to interact through group work, presentations, debates, workshops, guess speakers, which is highly relevant with and applicable to the workplace). In the end, the actual content that students learn in different business schools or masters will more or less always be the same, which therefore should not be something to factor in too much when making your choice of which school to attend. What matters is the way it is taught, the people you work with (fellow students and teachers) and the career programs made available to you. My last factor is (4) the city of Barcelona that is an ideal place to study in as it offers a new language to learn as opposed to most other European business schools, a great social life and a “hot” scene for those wanting to enter (tech) startups. I definitely recommend applying there, you will not regret the experience and the (long-term) benefits Esade offers!