One Day at A Time
EvMBA collaborative study group with homemade empanadas.
Juggling work, school, and personal life is no easy feat, especially when joining one of the most competitive and highly regarded Evening MBA programs in the country.
I won’t sugar coat it: there are days when you’ve got plenty of things to do from all realms of life and it feels like there is no way to possibly manage. That lingering feeling of impending doom is sometimes tough to knock.
I can’t speak for your work and personal life, but I can speak about my experience with an Evening MBA program that may help you anticipate what to expect when joining Goizueta Business School’s Evening MBA program.
First of all, our courses are designed with the business professional in mind. In your first year, you’ll have the same foundation courses taught to all the cohorts before you, with tenured professors who (for the most part) understand the importance of work-life balance. You’ll be engaged with professors who make the coursework thought-provoking and easily digestible, through real-world examples and presentations from current business leaders. For example, in our first-year Marketing course, we had presentations from prominent business leaders including the CEO of Truist Bank, a tenured co-founder who popularized tech functionalities used across all car companies, and marketing leadership from a startup innovating women’s hair care products.
That’s not to say your coursework will be a cakewalk. At the end of the day, it’s added learning on top of a full working day. Many of my classmates, including myself, had not been in school for a long time. I worried about my own ability to learn new concepts in an academic setting after years of full-time employment. That being said, you’ll be surprised how effective you become at time management, organization, and renewed commitment to learning.
One major benefit I forgot to incorporate into my self-fueled MBA insecurities was the power of amazing classmates. In large part, my cohort functions as a team: exchanging support based on each individual’s strengths in an environment that feels safe to offer all opinions and speak up if you don’t understand something. I’m constantly surprised and impressed by my peers’ ability to learn new concepts, relate them to amazingly unique life experiences, and teach others. Through my classmates, I’ve been able to patch up any pre-existing knowledge gaps from my coursework and ultimately excel.
The important thing to remember is to take things one day at a time. When adding school to your daily routine, it is easy to look at all your required tasks and get pre-occupied with doubt. A much more effective and grey-hair-preventing approach is to focus on what you can get done today and in what order. Map your day out the night before or in the morning. Organize your schoolwork into priorities: what needs to get done right now, what you need other people to start working on, or what your brain is influencing you to get done now that actually isn’t time-sensitive. That’s an essential skill I’ve began to develop since the onset of my MBA program and has helped me succeed thus far.
That, along with three meals a day, meditation, and reminding yourself to smile! I am no smarter than you. If I can do it, I am confident that you can, too.
Thanks for reading, and shoutout to all my people checking things off their to-do list on a daily basis.