Hi everyone! The end of the semester has finally arrived! (Check out the Q&A opportunity at the end though!) I was starting to think it never would… Just kidding! (I think.) But now that it has ended I thought it best to look back on the completion of my first year of graduate school. I’m halfway to graduation!

If you’ve missed my previous posts feel free to check out my MBA Life page for all the previous posts.

Also, I do want to give the opportunity for a Q&A! I was thinking it would be primarily a Q&A about my MBA journey but I’m not sure if there’s actually that many questions on that so whatever you want to ask go for it. If I do have a lot then I’ll split it into MBA and everything else but otherwise you’ll probably get the answers on Monday’s post! If I don’t get any I’ll be sad so get your thinking caps on. Once you have your question(s) leave me a comment or go to my Contact page to send it to me!

I have to say, I love that so many people seem to love these as much as I do! I felt that maybe they’d be boring but I get good responses (and some of you are in grad school too!) so I’m so happy about that.

Okay, so I’ll start off reflecting on the spring semester that just ended. With the successful completion of the spring semester I’m officially halfway through the program! I’m in a part time two year program for my MBA. This semester I took Marketing Management and Finance Management. My marketing class was already posted and I got an A! For finance, the professor didn’t submit the grade yet but he did email everyone in the class individually with our grades and I did receive an A in that one too! A 4.0 for the spring semester!

I did have both professors in my undergrad courses at the college (I’m going to the same school) and they’re great. I had had my marketing professor for my senior capstone class and my finance professor for a j-term Excel course. They both remembered me from the classes which I find so incredible as they have had a lot of students over the years! I really loved getting to learn from both of them again as they’re incredibly smart and hilarious as well.

Overall I think that my grades are honestly the least of it though. The point, after all, is to learn. And I do feel like I did. In marketing we were able to put together an entire marketing plan and in finance we got a lot of practice writing memos and analyzing numbers. I felt that although the classes were stressful at times, looking back they were perfectly challenging and engaging.  I think that my time management skills were definitely strengthened by the end. I really had to be disciplined and complete the work early to give myself time to check the work and then fix whatever I did wrong. However, the classes were really in sync, unfortunately for us. If we had a paper due in one class we certainly had homework due in the other rather than having them alternate. So I’d have a week where I was absolutely free of obligations to the classroom and others where that consumed my life.

I’m happy that I was able to use some days off from work to get more done. After my work trip to Houston I took a day off to catch up on stuff and I also took a day off before finals to make sure I got everything done. I’m planning to continue to strategize my days off for my future classes. And yes, they were previously scheduled days off where I made sure to work hard at the office to get my stuff done and make sure my coworker could cover for me, not just taking “sick” days or something like that.

I have to say, I am so happy to have the support of the people around me and I am so, so thankful. My parents are just over the moon that I’m back in school and they’re also so happy that I’m still living at home so they bend over backwards to help me. They don’t have to and I make sure they know that but they still love to help even if it’s just something like switching my loads of laundry because I’m so into a paper that I completely forgot I’m doing laundry. My coworkers are also so supportive. They’re always asking me about how class is and they don’t care if I leave early on class days to get to school on time or anything. When I have an exam or presentation they wish me luck as I leave for the day. The same goes for my managers. They’re always very accommodating and supportive.

I think I’m going to miss my classmates this summer. I don’t want to spoil too much of the posts for next week (where I’ll talk about my summer class plans) but I don’t think I’ll see most of them at all in class as I’m taking a different one than them. I think I’ll miss them. Well some I’ll miss more than others. (Not the annoying lady from the first semester or the annoying guy from this semester.) I have my buddies that are always fun to talk to but they won’t necessarily be taking the same classes as me anymore since now we’re onto our MBA electives. There also a few people graduating and a few that started the program in the spring so they’ll have to finish up the core classes in the fall and j-term. I did pass on my textbook from the fall to a classmate so that she could use it and save the money. She tried to pay me for it but I told her that someone had passed on a book to me and so I wanted to pay it forward and help someone else. Hopefully she’ll be able to pass it on too! Oh, and there’s one that’s pregnant so I believe she’s going to take off next fall to have the baby and focus on that. (It’s a boy!)

I think that going forward I’ll still need to scale back my posts when classes start again. I’m glad I was able to do BirthMay still at the beginning of the month as throughout the semester I had to keep skipping posts due to the work load. Well, it’s not that I couldn’t do it, I certainly could have, but I didn’t want to because I didn’t want to make my blog feel like work or post things that I didn’t really put effort into. I also didn’t want to stress myself out for that either and therefore I did chose to scale back or skip some days. That will likely still happen going forward but I’ll try to warn you if it will. For now, I’ll still blog everyday for BirthMay though!

Overall I know I’m probably looking back at the semester through the hazy midst brought on by my happiness that it’s over and that I have a few weeks off now. I looked at my previous posts from early in the semester and I sounded stressed, which isn’t how I remember it at all! I do tend to focus on the positives in general so maybe that’s it. I think my love and desire for education is ultimately what propels me forward through the challenging parts and I’m happy for it. Just one more year to go!

And that’s really all I have! Don’t forget to leave me your Q’s so I can give you my A’s next week.

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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