By Vince Cellini - June 22nd, 2011  Category: CCMBA 2012| Introductions I wrote in my last post that I decided on a new direction, a new path in life, and so went with the MBA option. Now beyond the decision, I wanted to write about the reasoning behind my decision. Please understand that the following is my perspective and my opinion, and is based sometimes only loosely on facts and reality. I also have a terrible tendency to go off on tangents. Those who have met me can attest to this, though I take pride in circling around to come back to the point…eventually. Just enjoy the trip along the tangents I say. So with that being said, please take everything with a grain of salt.
I was talking with a friend over dinner this last week. She is a lawyer that is in the process of jumping industries and taking the huge plunge of starting medical school to be a doctor. Now that was a heck of a surprise and sounded like quite a risk to me. I can understand it as I’ve changed jobs myself. Life is far too short to spend time in something that you don’t like, or how she put it, “I felt like every day I was dying a little inside.” When I expressed my surprise, she said that I was taking quite a risk myself, going for my MBA. I did the impolite thing and laughed a little. I told her that while it’s a risk, MBA candidates and graduates are usually incredibly risk averse.
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By Jordan Lofton - June 20th, 2011 Category: CCMBA 2012| Introductions It’s on every MBA applicant’s list of essay questions to answer, “Why an MBA? Why now? Why this program?” You take a deep breath and really start to examine how to boil down your goal of an MBA into a 500 word essay. Here’s the story of how I answered these three seemingly simple questions for myself.
I was 12 years old when I first had the idea of attending Duke. Actually, it was the first time I ever thought of going to college at all. I grew up on a small farm in rural North Carolina. Growing up, money was hard to come by, but chores were not. You fall into a rhythm when you grow up on a farm. The animals have to eat, they have to be milked, they have to have hay and water. You go through the routine everyday knowing that it’s not a get rich quick scheme. It’s hard manual labor, and the lives of the animals depend on it. That’s a lot for a young girl to realize at the age of 12. It’s also a lot to realize that if it’s only your parents, you, and your younger brother helping with chores, maybe those chores won’t get done if you grew up and moved away.
I was a quiet kid growing up, so I never explicitly said anything to my parents about my thoughts of staying and helping on the farm after high school. In my head it was a given. We had no money for school and there was too much work for me to leave on just my parents. I’m not sure how my mother figured it out one day, but I distinctly remember the moment. We were sitting in the Wal-Mart parking lot and we were about to head back to start our afternoon chores. There was some exchange which passed between my mother and I about how many chores there were and I must have said something about her not worrying about that because I’d always be there to help.
She stopped, put the car back in park, turned and looked at me and said “Jordan, I hope you don’t think that you are going to stay on the farm and not go to school. You are going to college.” I was shocked. That is what I thought. I was going to go to college? It seemed like the dream of winning the lottery. How was that going to happen? “No matter what you decide to do after, you are going to college. Think for a minute and tell me where you think you would like to go.” I sat there quietly thinking about it and taking in this new revelation. After a few minutes I looked up, “I think I want to go to Duke.” “Good!”, my mom said, “Then one day you will go there.” She threw the car in gear and we pulled out of the Wal-Mart parking lot, talking the whole way home about making plans for college.
Life changed a lot over those next few years. We sold the family farm and moved into town. High school came and passed. My father started his own company. Then it was finally time, I was going to college. Life happens, goals change, and at the time the right fit for my undergrad was The University of Georgia. There were accounting finals, stressing over getting accepted to Terry Business School, football games, life long friendships made, and finally the degree I had worked for since I was 12. One thing that was now embedded in me was the dream of education. From the time we left the Wal-Mart parking lot somehow it seemed like I could go a lot further than just an undergraduate degree. I wanted something more. I wanted a Masters.
At that point in time I had the goal of an MBA, but I could not answer the “Why?” questions. It’s great to have a goal of having an MBA, but why did I have it? Over the next few years I worked away at my consulting job pondering how I would answer that essay question. Well, I could say I wanted it so I could get a promotion. Not true, I could keep working away and eventually I would get promoted. I could say I wanted it because I wanted to change industries. Not entirely true. I didn’t know what I wanted to do period, so maybe I wasn’t going to switch maybe I was, I couldn’t even answer that question. I could say a bunch of things, but I could never write a 500 word essay that convinced even myself that is why I wanted my MBA. So I waited.
To be continued….
By Vince Cellini - June 13th, 2011 Category: CCMBA 2012| Introductions As this is my first post, I thought I would give a bit of background. Please bear with me as I’m new to this. I’ve had a whirlwind of a time with the MBA application process and I’ll start out from the beginning. In much the same way that Randy Zwitch began this blog back in 2009, I first had to decide on a direction.
So my background is a tad unorthodox. I did a fine job on my undergrad at a local school and graduated with my bachelors…in European History. Now, at that time, I thought teaching was the direction for me. After a few years, I figured out it certainly was NOT the direction for me. I love to teach, but kids’ parents are annoying, admin is a joke, and the pay is absolutely insane (in a very bad way). So a career change was in order.
Looking around, I figured I would give business a shot. I landed a job as a secretary of all things. I did well at my job, though I’ll admit part of that is I’m very good at looking busy/intelligent/industrious. I know how to work when I need to, but I also know how NOT to work. After a couple of years, and a few promotions, I was the office manager of a nice little consulting firm in S.F. Now I had the problem of hitting a ceiling. In that position, there wasn’t much higher I could climb. Darn it all to heck and back, I was frustrated (I’m a tad ambitious)!
So, again looking around, I thought of how I was good at using my company’s accounting software and seemed to just ‘get’ numbers. Now why I ‘get’ numbers is beyond me, but I find myself counting random things in a meeting. If someone is throwing around numbers, I naturally start adding them, or doing something with them mentally. Also, not that I really understand it, but according to those funky tests you take in school for aptitude, I seemed to always score high with pattern recognition and pulling order out of seeming chaos. Whatever.
Now, knowing I had a knack for numbers and such, I thought accounting was the way to go. So I jumped right off that safe (and highly overpaid) bridge to take a big pay cut as a lowly bookkeeper. At the same time I was back in school taking a huge number of courses (working and going to school full time is NO joke) to prep for the CPA (did I mention that I’m ambitious?).
Fast forwarding a few years, I now have my CPA, an additional piece of paper as a CFE, and am manager of my company’s accounting department. Quite a jump in only a few years (stupid ambition). The problem is, I don’t know what the heck I’m doing half the time (remember my comment earlier about my skills at looking industrious?). The accounting is fine, though I could wish for more challenges. My weakness is the management stuff. I just don’t seem to get it. So, once again, I’m looking for a way to fix this and came up with the idea of an MBA.
In the early part of the summer of 2010, I was meeting with my boss and, as we often do, our conversation was all over the place. We talked about our projects, our clients, our company’s current cash flows, etc. I mentioned to him that I had been thinking about going back to school for my Master’s. I am already a CPA as well as a CFE (Certified Fraud Examiner) so I imagined that an additional degree couldn’t hurt. When I said that an MBA might be a possibility, he jumped at the idea. I went back to my desk and started doing some serious research on the MBA. I found out what I had to do, which schools made sense for me, and all the little bits I’d have to take care of to start down this new path. I know there are holes in my knowledge, I admit them, and am very motivated to fix this.
What I find interesting in this process is how each of us as students came to the decision to pursue the MBA. As you can see above, the journey to my decision was a long one. I’d be interested in hearing from others on how they decided to go this ambitious, challenging, and dare I say costly direction.
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