Hi Friends! I got back last night from a weekend in Cambridge. Like I said earlier, I was going for an on-campus requirement at Harvard, where I’m working toward a master’s degree in Management. I got a few questions about graduate school in general and my experience, so I thought I’d share a little more today!
Why are you going to graduate school?
I don’t really have one reason, and to be honest, had I started the blog first, I probably wouldn’t be going right now. It’s something that I thought about after graduating from college, but decided to put off for a few years while I got more work experience and decided what I wanted to do. In the meantime, a bunch of my friends went back to school.
For me, I keep waiting and thinking about a specific field of study, but it didn’t come to me. I found out that my work has a pretty good tuition reimbursement program, so in 2015, I decided to go for Management (which is a general business degree). I figured, why not? I’m always up for learning more and advancing myself. But it also had to do with the fact that my parents, Chris, and most of my friends have at least one master’s degree (or higher) so I wanted one too.
Would you recommend it? What’s part-time like vs. full-time like?
I’d always recommend furthering your education, but there’s so many ways to do so that don’t necessary require getting a formal degree. (For example, I’ve learned SO much starting a blog). If you want/need to enroll in a program and get a diploma, I would recommend having slightly more direction than I did. It’s a lot of time and money if you don’t really know why you’re going, or how it’ll benefit you. But if your work (or if you have a rich uncle!) is going to help you pay for it, that helps a ton!
Several of my friends went full-time, and there’s definitely pros and cons to both. Either way, it’s a ton of work and commitment, and requires sacrificing…fun things, haha. If you guys would like to hear more about their full-time experiences, I can definitely ask them to do a guest post! From what I heard, it’s nice to be able to focus solely on school and not have other distractions, but it’s not fun to go without an income.
What’s your program like?
My program is through Havard Univeristy’s Division of Continuing Education. A lot of very prestigious universities have similar programs now! My program can be completely entirely on campus, or partially on campus and partially online. Since I live in Chicago, I do the bare minimum requirement for on-campus classes, although being on campus is definitely more engaging and fun. But there are definitely benefits to doing classes online. For evening classes, I can change into PJ pants. If there’s a part that I didn’t understand, I can rewind the recording and listen again. For those lectures that aren’t live, I can listen at 1.5X speed if the professor talks really slowly, or be eating dinner while I’m listening.
Another benefit of an online program is that there are students from all over the world and all walks of life. Some of these individuals aren’t able to convene in one spot all the time because they live in Egypt or Thailand, or because they have busy day jobs as entrepreneurs, CEOs, doctors, lawyers, engineers, or journalists. To me, this really enriches our discussions – to hear so many different points of view and experiences.
When are you graduating?
I don’t know, haha. Since fall of 2015, I’ve only been taking one class per semester. I got engaged a couple months after starting school, so it was on to wedding planning. And then after the wedding, I starting Instagramming/blogging. This summer, I decided add a summer class as well to help speed up the process. Most of my classmates take 2 classes at a time so they’re able to finish within 2-3 years. If you go full-time, you can finish in 1-2 years. I’m just aiming for…by 2021?
I hope this was helpful to you guys! Feel free to share your experience, or let me know if you have any other questions! Happy Monday!
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