“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” — Zig Ziglar
It is hard to believe that it has been nearly five months since my last post. After the conclusion of my first semester, I planned to write a post about how my first semester went. However, that one-week break between semesters went by too quickly, especially with assignments to complete for summer courses before classes actually began. As of the writing of this post, I have completed all of my final exams for my summer classes and I am officially done with my second semester of graduate school! However, the short break went by entirely too fast. Starting tomorrow, I begin my third semester.
In this previous semester, I completed four classes as I took two courses during each half of the semester. In the first half of the semester, I completed a leadership course as well as a finance course. In the second half of the semester, which just ended, I completed a business law course as well as an operations management course. That makes seven total core classes completed since I started the MBA program at Georgia Tech. While many of my core classes have been similar to my undergraduate courses, they allowed me to brush up on previously learned knowledge. I also gained new knowledge in the courses I previously completed during undergrad, as well as enjoyed learning from courses I never took before, such as operations management.
I wanted to use this blog post to share some of my learnings and take-aways from graduate school thus far.
1) This is the toughest thing I have done in my life (so far). Balancing a full-time job with a top-ranked part-time MBA program is quite difficult. All the while, there are many aspects of my personal life to maintain as well.
2)I need to be better with time management. This is a product of the first bullet point above. When you only have so much time in the day, you really need to make sure that you stay on top of everything. I think I have progressed with my time management but still have room to improve to better manage everything.
3) Going back to school after being in the workforce full-time is tougher than I expected. Despite it being tough to go back to school and having to get back into a more concentrated learning mindset and studying habits, that is not the primary reason I am talking about. When you are in the workforce, you learn a lot on the job and there are a lot of demands and deadlines put on you. The academic environment simply is not quite comparable to the working environment. Going back to a more “cushioned” environment can be difficult to re-adjust to once you have dealt with the realities of working life.
4) You have to pick and choose your battles. In your undergraduate career, you are typically focused full-time on your studies. While there may be other part-time jobs involved to help pay for school, the overwhelming majority of your time is spent in classes and studying. While balancing a full-time career with a demanding part-time program, I had to learn that I could not take the same approach as I did in undergrad. Sometimes you simply cannot read all of the material before class or spend as much time studying as you did in undergrad. You have to pick and choose what is most important and where you need to focus on, knowing you may not get to it all.
5) Previous work experience matters, a lot. There is a reason that most MBA programs require at least two years of work experience and make the total amount of work experience a factor in the admissions decision. It is difficult to formulate an informed opinion when you have no experience to back up your thoughts. Everything is theoretical until it is actually applied, and the workforce is where the knowledge is applied. If you can apply what you learn to your job, whether directly or indirectly, and hear informed opinions from peers who are also in the workforce, it enhances the learning. I strongly believe that someone with very little to no work experience would not be able to contribute much to the discussion in the MBA courses. The discussion that occurs in these courses is a critical component of learning in an MBA program.