Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Back to School?

Over the last few months I’ve been searching for a direction to take my life since I haven’t really known where it was going lately. The last 5-6 months or so I’ve felt overwhelmed by a sense of being lost and empty, like I really need something, but haven’t been able to fill that emptiness with anything. So looking to logic and my brain instead of going with my heart, which seems to betray me more often than not, I’ve decided that I’m going to start looking at grad schools to go to in order to get my MBA.

I’ve been doing some initial research and I’ve found that here in Rochester there are three different MBA programs that I could potentially enroll in. I’m only looking at the MBA programs for professionals, by the way, the programs that would allow me to continue working for Kingland Systems while still being able to go to college. Sure, I probably won’t have a single spare moment of time while trying to work and do classes, and I plan on taking as much of a load as possible so I can get it done as fast as possible, but right now I don’t really want free time.

Free time right now seems like nothing more than a burden to me. I find myself wallowing in loneliness, self-loathing, and careful introspection when I have too much time to myself. I also find it’s hard to develop a bustling social life in this town since many of the friends I have are never too keen on actually getting together that often and doing things or are married, so what better way to fill up my free time than with tons of schooling?

Now the options that I have available to me are programs through either the University of Minnesota, St. Mary’s University, or the University of St. Thomas. I’ve initially knocked the UofM program off of my list for two reasons. First, their program is actually quite expensive. It’s about $10,000 more expensive than St. Mary’s program. I haven’t found out St. Thomas’ prices yet so I can’t make a comparison there. The second reason I’m not really looking at the UofM program is that they are very rigid in the prerequisites you need to start.

St. Mary’s is an attractive program, but it also has a bunch of prerequisites that I would have to take before I could start whereas St. Thomas is geared towards someone with not a ton of classroom experience, so if you have a degree in something not finance, accounting, business, or something like that, it’s ok. Instead St. Thomas would like their students to have at least 2 years experience in the business world. This might be what holds me back from getting in to St. Thomas. Hopefully not, though, since that’s the program I am most attracted to.

I’m going to an informational meeting tomorrow about the St. Thomas MBA program so I can hopefully get some good information about their program. Now if anyone reading this has any tips on getting an MBA or any of these programs in general, please share as I’m pretty much on my own here.

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