Days in the Life of Two Online MBAs: Two Different Paces, Same Destination
After 30 years in marketing and a decade of running his own interactive advertising agency, Josh Moritz enrolled in the two-year Fast Track MBA program at Babson College. He decided it was time to bring a financial foundation to his creative and marketing background.
"I wanted to think long term about moving into a more financial role, expand my horizons to raising capital to buy or invest in other companies." An hour away in Wappingers Falls, New York, Scott Van Zandt recently completed his MBA online through Marist College - a process that took him four and a half years to complete. Scott took advantage of a tuition reimbursement benefit at his full time job as comptroller at a local credit union. Having his MBA, he says "gives me the opportunity to put my foot in the door in that senior management role."
Scott, who is married with two young daughters, and needed a program with a lot of flexibility, both as to when he could study and how long he could take to complete the degree. "It's nice on a Saturday morning to wake up and still be in your p.j.s and login and work on a paper," he says. Marist's curriculum requires eleven courses and follows a traditional semester calendar. "It took longer than I thought it would, due to having two kids and buying our first home in the middle of it all and I needed to say sometimes, you know what, I can't take a class this semester."
Josh is 54 and lives with his wife in Westport, Connecticut. Two of his three sons are in high school and one started college last fall. Since October of 2008, he has been juggling work and family obligations with a schoolwork load he calls "very, very intense." For Fast Track students, a new module of three integrated classes begins every seven weeks.
Currently Josh is taking National Business Systems, Macroeconomics and Finance. Each course has its own professors but some assignments and subject matter interrelates. He has found that, while there are differences, learning online he still gets the interaction he needs. "When you've got a chalkboard in front of you, you can keep asking the question until you understand. In live online lectures the professor can always change things in response to your questions, but pre-recorded you can't. Then you go to the next thing which is to post a question on the discussion thread to the professor and it's answered within hours."
Balancing School and Family
For both men, as fathers and husbands, they find the most challenging aspect of serious coursework is finding the time to do it without sacrificing family life. "Most of my work I would try to focus as much on the evenings so that my weekends were free for family obligations," says Scott, who took his MBA one course at a time. "That being said, it did often spill over into the weekends for three or for hours." Scott's program required little to no real-time interaction - the majority of discussion occurred in online discussion postings.
Josh is enrolled in three classes that all require reading, group projects and papers. "I try to make time to see my son's basketball game on Saturdays. Then when they call for a lecture for 6:30 or 7 at night - there goes the family dinner," says Josh. "I did have one situation where my wife took a business trip, and there was a lecture called for the evening. I wrote to the professor and said 'Look, I'm gonna sign on, but I've got to take care of dinner.' I was running between preparing, eating and cleaning up and trying to pop in to the presentation. She was fine with it, the professors are very understanding."
Covering the Same Subject in Different Ways
Babson's program incorporates online live lectures with video presentations, emails between students and professors, threaded discussions and using Skype for group chats. For live lectures that happen about once per week, the text of the presentation is available to download and follow as you listen. The virtual classroom includes a concurrent chat area where you can type questions and a button to click to 'raise your hand/grab the mic'. The instructor can follow the chat comments and respond in real time and is able to call on students to speak. Other lectures are recorded and posted for viewing at a student's convenience.
"I love these lectures. If you're like me and end up studying in the evenings and fall asleep through a couple of slides you can back it up and watch it again," says Josh. Josh's program at Babson also involves an offline meeting every six weeks, face to face with classmates and instructors. He drives three hours each way to participate but finds these meetings and live online sessions especially valuable for math-intensive classes which he finds challenging.
Scott's online learning experience revolved mostly around forum discussions and an occasional lecture via teleconference, where all the students dialed into a conference call to hear a live lecture. "It really depended on the classes, what the week of study looked like. A lot of the coursework was posting to the discussions, to talk about relevant subjects and bring current events into the picture and to show that we understood the material.
Going the DistanceJosh and Scott are part of a growing trend towards online business education. The number of students who completed online MBA programs jumped 16% between 2004 and 2008, and it continues to grow.
"The biggest challenge was getting myself online," says Scott, "because you're not required to be in class anywhere. They gave you the flexibility to be able to work at your own pace, however you had to manage your work load so that you could stay on top of your due dates." At Marist, each instructor offered online office hours every week when they were available for live chat. "Most of them did a great job in being very clear and concise about what they were looking for so I didn't feel like I needed to check in with them so often" says Scott.
For Josh, the accelerated pace has meant giving himself some leeway with regard to his performance. "The first year was tough, but you could do it," he says. "Unless you aren't working full time, there are going to be times when you're just not going to get great grades." Scott feels the key to success is finding the balance of work, family and study. "It's logging in and making sure you're active in discussions, breaking away from the family for an hour or two to check in online" he says.
Regardless of which MBA program you choose, earning an advanced degree online is a serious commitment. As Scott and Josh both discovered, whether you are studying full or part time, online study requires a mastery of the art of time management and self motivation. The reward, they've found, is worth the work.
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