What's the most challenging thing that you have ever done? Running a marathon, renovating a Bermuda cottage or bringing up children may come high up on a scale of personal achievements.

Ask Cris Valdes-Dapena, Ifor Hughes, Marisa Hall and Mark Lima, however and they are likely to give the same response: getting a Masters of Business Administration is one of the most demanding things you can undertake.

These Bermuda executives went through very different styles of programmes, variously described by them as a "pressure cooker" and a "survival of the fittest", but all agree on one thing: getting your MBA is no picnic.

In the same way that high school students make a huge transition as they attend university and are taught how to think, a good MBA programme helps business people to shift up a gear - it can teach business and life skills that might otherwise take a lifetime to absorb.

Of course not all MBA programmes lead to the same kinds of opportunities. There is a strong historical market perception which favours American Ivy League MBA's over others. Take a look at the top executives at Fortune 500 companies. Overwhelmingly they hail from Wharton, Columbia, Stanford, NYC, Kellogg and the Harvard Business School. In Europe, INSEAD, London Business School, IESE, or IMD attract most prestige.

Many people dispute the significance of an MBA: the most notable sceptic was Bear Stearns' Ace Greenberg who said he looked for people with a PSD, Poor, Smart, and Desirous of getting Rich.

But despite what the cynics might say, there is only so much that you can learn on the job, and the majority of successful corporations will encourage employees who show the motivation to tackle an MBA.

Mark Lima is a senior vice president at ACE Financial Solutions Ltd. ACE paid for him to attend an MBA programme which was designed for Bermuda insurance professionals by the former College of Insurance, now part of St. John's University.

Asked what motivated him, Mr. Lima says: "I was tired of sitting in meetings and not understanding the finance aspect."

A specialist MBA was of more use to him than a more generalist programme at one of the better known business schools.

He was able to take courses that were relevant to his career and bone up on those subjects that had previously perplexed him.

It proved to be a good strategy; learning about subjects such as alternative risk finance helped Mr. Lima to move from being an excess liability underwriter to a more senior role in the finite risk segment: "a blend between traditional insurance and finance".

Mr. Lima says that the long distance MBA was extremely challenging, particularly since he and wife Becky had a small child and were building a house at the same time. "There were some dark moments," he says. "There's no way that I could have done this without Becky."

The College of Insurance MBA was designed so that people wouldn't have to leave their jobs. Once a quarter, instructors flew down from the US to teach for five days in Bermuda. Mark says that during those five days the learning curve was so intense that one lecturer described it as "trying to get a drink of water out of a running firehose".

In comparison, the classic MBA model is to interrupt your career for two years, attend the MBA at your company's expense and then return in a blaze of glory with your new management skills. But this can also be difficult for senior execs with a wife and children.

"Frankly I take my hat off to people who are able to combine it with a family," says Ifor Hughes, who has an MBA from the University of Western Ontario in Canada.

Mr. Hughes is head of compliance at the Bank of Bermuda and formerly with the Ministry of Finance. At 24 he left his job at the Bank of Bermuda and spent two years full time at Western, which has arguably the best business school programme in Canada.

Mr. Hughes says that Western appealed to him for three reasons: firstly it was a generalist programme and not all number crunching; secondly it uses the case study approach and thirdly it was definitely cheaper to study the MBA in Canada than in the US.

"The first year is very much survival of the fittest" says Mr. Hughes. He recalls that every day after classes and tutorials he would have to do on average six hours study per night. There was a fairly high drop out rate. The second year was much easier. "Finally you realise that it is impossible to do all the work assigned to you every day. You have to prioritise. In your study group you learn to work as a team, just as you do in a business."

For Mr. Hughes, the motivation to put himself through an MBA was to acquire greater decision making and analytical skills. "Not to get an extra zero on the end of my salary, or so that I could make vice president," he laughs.

Cris Valdes-Dapena, managing director of the Property Group chose a two year executive programme at Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania.

Instead of being based in Philadelphia, she carried on her job in Bermuda at the Insurance Company of North America: "Every other Thursday I hopped on a flight to Philadelphia and had classes all day Friday, all day Saturday and then flew home on Sunday".

This was supplemented by the odd week-long course, but a lot of the studying was done in the evening after work.

In her understated way, Cris says: "It was a busy time in my life". At the end of the two year period where she had been working a 40 hour week she says she could not remember anything about her daily life "I vowed not to read a word that wasn't fiction for at least a year."

There are pros and cons to immersion in a full time MBA. For some, coming from a small island in the centre of the Atlantic, it can be a great opportunity to get international exposure.

For Marisa Hall, the Babson MBA involved travelling to South America and a team of classmates with diverse international experience. In her first project, the team included a Greek engineer, an American who had worked for McKinsey in Russia and an Argentinian. different.

Now a Senior E-commerce analyst at the ministry of Telecommunications and E-commerce, Marisa entered the MBA at Babson College in Massachusetts when she was only 22. Babson has a good reputation for its entrepreneurial business programme.

The accepted wisdom at schools such as Wharton and Harvard is that MBA students should have at least two years business experience before they enrol on an MBA programme.

In Marisa's case, she was the youngest in her class and had only one year's experience at a start-up company.

But during that one year, she had been thrown in at the deep end and even ended up making presentations to venture capitalists. When she arrived at business school, she says there were certain "age-related issues and gender related issues" that had to be overcome."

It's not unusual for high levels of self confidence and testosterone to emerge during MBA programmes. Classmates take a while to size up each others' experience and acumen, and some can be reluctant to listen to other points of view.

At Harvard business school last year, one section had an inflatable shark that would be presented to a section member whose comments were viewed as too aggressive.

Eventually, the lesson hits home that the person sitting next to you can teach you something.

In Cris Valdes-Dapena's case, this was even more pronounced because on an executive programme everyone was at least 30 years of age, a manager of their company and from a different background. As a result, it was common for the students had more practical experience of an issue than the teachers who were giving a course.

"The education wasn't just coming from the front of the room, it was coming from all around." Lecturers had to be prepared to be challenged by the students if their lesson was at odds with real life business.

She recalls one instance when one of the students, a CFO of a major company, stood up in the middle of a lecture on capital asset pricing models and boomed "Randy that is bull****." As Mrs. Valdes-Dapena points out, the contribution of her fellow students was to make the programme much more practical, "If it hadn't been challenged, we'd have bought this guy's theory evaluation hook, line and sinker."

One the most valuable qualities of an MBA is therefore that every classmate on the course contributes their best nuggets of information from their own experience. Consequently good business schools attempt to have diversity in terms of professional and educational background.

At Harvard business school there is a mix of engineers, brain surgeons, bankers and even lawyers. Barclay Simmons, a partner at Attride Stirling & Woleneicki is currently attending Harvard businesss school. He is the first Bermudian to do so since 1973.

Mr. Simmons says he was inspired by a long list of MBA graduates he has known in Bermuda, starting with his elder brother, Curtis Lee Dickinson, who graduated with an MBA from Columbia University, Troy Symonds of Fort Knox Bermuda (MBA Henley), Allan and William Gray of Orbis (both with MBA's from Harvard), Michael Butt formerly of XL Board (MBA INSEAD) and Michael Esposito (MBA NYC) Chairman of XL.

Mr. Simmons says that although it is exceptionally competitive to get into HBS, it should not be regarded as out of reach. He would be happy to talk to people about the application process.

For any one considering an MBA, general advice would be to do a lot of due diligence, or as Ifor Hughes puts it: "Treat it like a business model, identify the problem, identify the alternatives, subject the alternatives to analysis and make a recommendation, then look at implementation."