On 03/01/2021, I finished my final course in my MBA at Western Governors University. I am very proud of myself and this awesome accomplishment. I know that it will help me achieve greater financial stability, more responsibility, and a leadership position.
It took me three terms to complete for a total of 16 months. For 11 of those months, starting in April, I was working from home and that really helped me a lot. I am still working from home.
Here is what my school/life/work status is…
My wife and I celebrated 10 years of marriage in October (we had a cruise planned, but it got canceled due to Covid-19), we have a 4 1/2 year old son, and I have a full time job at Chase bank. My job and my family always come first before anything!
My first term started on 11/01/2019 and my wife had surgery on 11/9/2019. I took the following week off to help her and take care of our son. It was a lot of work; mainly because he got sick later on that week and two days that week, he woke up at 4:30 am. Yes, I was overwhelmed with everything and tried my best to get some school work completed; it was really hard balancing my job, my wife, my son, and my school work. The week I returned back to work, my attention span for school was shrinking, I was tired when I came home from work, and I didn’t think I could keep on doing it. I was ready to quit. I also wasn’t motivated and didn’t want to put the time in to study. I was absolutely set on my decision to leave. That same week, my Program Mentor was away, so I spoke to somebody else and along with his and my wife’s positive encouragement, I stayed on course.
When my second term started on 05/01/2020, I again wanted to quit. At that time, my son’s night-time routine was hectic and crazy; he would run around the house screaming and laughing for an hour. It was very stressful on me and when he would finally stop and get in his bed for sleeping, my brain was fried! By the time I was able to decompress (I usually need about 30 minutes and that includes time to clean the kitchen, take trash out, get a drink, get some food, and read some headlines on the internet) and eventually login to the WGU site, it was already close to 10 pm and that was when I told myself to be done no matter where I was in the course of studying. This behavior lasted a few weeks for him. Obviously, I didn’t quit; what did help me was substituting Ethical Leadership for Accounting for Decision Makers. I needed an easier class rather than a brain buster math course.
When my third term started on 11/01/2020, I was motivated to finish as I had just two courses and the capstone remaining. I could see the end.
My study time was always done in the evenings after my son was sleeping and it was as short as 30 minutes or as long as 2 hours. No matter where I was in the course of studying, I made 10 pm my stopping time. I needed my beauty sleep! I did have several evenings where I did nothing for school; it was because of tiredness, stress, or taking a night off to celebrate passing a course. On the weekends during the day, I was dad and husband, not a student. Only when I was preparing for an OA, I would actually be all three at the same time.
I am aware that other students have dedicated a lot more time and have finished much quicker than me and it doesn’t bother me at all. Everybody’s study habits are different and I was also not in a rush to breeze through a class; I enjoyed all the material.
My favorite classes were Business Communications, Ethical Leadership, Data Driven Decision Making, and Operations Management. Accounting for Decision Makers and Financial Management were the hardest for me and that is hard to admit since I have worked for Chase bank for 14 years, I was a high school football statistician for 19 years, and I had a math tutor in high school and college. I always considered myself pretty good at math, at least I thought I was!
Even though I belonged to some of the Facebook WGU groups, I was more of a voyeur than a helper. It was really nice to see lots of comments encouraging each other when somebody didn’t pass an OA or when somebody was having difficulties either in life itself or with school.
Personally, when I passed a course, I didn’t feel the need to share with those groups; I would share it with my wife, my parents, and my brother. However, I would write a quick blurb about it on my website (www.thedadspeaks.com). In addition to that website, I am also a freelance sports writer and sports photographer (yes, I have gotten paid for both) for another website (www.thestatmanspeaks.com). Now that school is done for me, I am looking forward to providing more content on both websites and doing other things for myself in the evenings (I already have a list).
Now, I will provide some quick positive thoughts on my Enrollment Counselor, my Program Mentor, the Proctors for OA’s, and the Course Instructors.
Besides the WGU website, my first point of contact was my Enrollment Counselor and we talked weekly from early September till a few days after my first term started. She was friendly, professional, and extremely informative about how things work at WGU. She really wanted to make sure I also knew how the WGU system works.
After I was finished with her, she set me up with a Program Mentor who had the same mannerisms as her. We clicked immediately! We talked weekly and I always made sure to tell her where I stood in a particular course and she would always say great job! Since, I didn’t require much help with courses or anything WGU related, we more than often talked about family and life; which was fine with me. My second term ended on 10/31/2020, but I finished my last course on 09/27/2020. When we spoke on 11/2/2020, she told me she missed speaking to me!
When I did need extra help in a course, which was very rare, the course instructors were easily reachable at my convenience and extremely helpful; my Ethical Leadership CI was absolutely awesome as we talked a few times. Whenever a written assessment was returned, the evaluator was very specific in what I needed to fix. The only thing I didn’t like was waiting for my papers to be evaluated. On my capstone, I checked the status of the three tasks about a million times.
I never had any issues with the proctors. I scheduled my OA’s in the evenings when I knew my son was sleeping and my wife would be upstairs. After the first one, I knew how to setup everything and the process went quicker and quicker for me. I took them all on my kitchen island and passed them all on my first try except for Financial Management And Global Economics for Managers.
So, now you may be wondering, what made me want to go back to school for a higher degree? Well, I have been contemplating getting a masters degree for a long time. At first, it was Sports Management, then Journalism, then Accounting, and finally an MBA. One of the benefits of the company I work for is employee tuition assistance which one of my co-workers told me about as she was getting her undergraduate degree at an another school. I shelled out a few hundred dollars and that was easier than taking a student loan to pay for the entire thing. And, like I mentioned at the beginning, it will help me achieve greater financial stability, more responsibility, and a leadership position.
If you want to ask me questions or need some general WGU MBA advice, please reach out to me and I will be happy to try to help you out.
mliebe4@wgu.edu
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-d-lieberman/ (if you want to connect on LinkedIn, please email me first so I can see your name and know you’re coming from WGU).
Thank you.
Mark Lieberman, MBA
Wow, that felt good to write that MBA after my name!!!!!!
