Done!

I’ll say right up front that this is an introspective post. That’s the more sophisticated way of saying “I’m about to embark on an ego trip and just talk about me.” You’ve been warned.

Some afternoon in early 2005 as we were in the midst of wedding planning madness, Christy and I found ourselves just generally discussing how we saw our future over the next couple years after the wedding. The subject of my MBA came up. “Let’s be honest,” she said, “you’ve pretty much given up on it, haven’t you?” I couldn’t disagree with her. It had been over a year since I’d taken a class towards my MBA, and I’d taken a whopping 2 in the year before that. An average of 1 class per year wasn’t gonna cut it, unless I was able to talk Depaul into putting me on the 15-year plan. I had registered for classes a couple times in the interim, but my travel schedule at work kept forcing me to drop. That situation didn’t seem likely to improve anytime soon either. Reluctantly, I conceded, “Yeah, I pretty much have.”

Now, a little over 2 years later, much has changed. Last night, barring some sort of catastrophic performance on my final, my just-shy-of-6-years' campaign to get a masters degree came to a successful conclusion.

So what changed between then and now? Well, a whole lot of things but it can probably best be summed up in one word: Hawaii. I’m sure most of you have been subjected to the ramblings from Christy and I that it is our dream to temporarily relocate to Hawaii for a few years. Whether or not that actually happens (and the odds seem to change from month to month and sometimes day to day) it is undoubtedly true that Hawaii has had a major impact on our lives. Not only did we get the vacation of a lifetime and the memories of that, but the idea of moving there led me to think seriously about what the best way to accomplish that would be. Since my work experience is in auditing, that seemed to be the only realistic way I could make enough money to support an existence in Hawaii. Getting an auditing job in Hawaii meant working for one of the Big Four accounting firms. Getting in there meant getting my CPA. Getting my CPA meant taking more accounting classes. Taking more accounting classes meant I might as well finish my MBA. But that’s just half the domino effect that occurred over the 6 months after our honeymoon. I quickly realized that taking classes was still not going to be feasible given the workload at my current job. So that led me to look elsewhere and eventually landed me at Blue Cross Blue Shield. And once I was working downtown, we figured that we might as well live there as well, so that led to us relocating from Palatine into the city. I sometimes think about all of this and wonder, “would any of this have happened if we had decided to take our honeymoon in the Caribbean instead?” Just goes to show you that you don’t always know when you are making a decision that will have a huge impact on your life.

I still remember walking from BCBS over to the Depaul loop campus on a Monday night last March. It was my first time attending class in almost 2 years. I had already done the math and knew I needed 8 classes to graduate. At 11 meetings per class, that meant 88 occasions that I would have to go directly from work over to class. At 3 hours per class, that meant 264 hours of trying to stay awake through lectures. I haven’t kept a running total throughout, but I have recalculated after pretty much every quarter. This last quarter I had a big red number written on every class day counting down to “1”. It felt awesome to cross that last one off when I walked into work this morning. I am happy to report that out of those 88 classes, I missed only 2. They were both for the same class too; once because it was the day after the Super Bowl, and once because we had just flown in from Phoenix 2 hours before class started. That means that I had perfect attendance in 7 of my last 8 classes. In the entirety of my undergrad, I had exactly 1 class with perfect attendance. While my grades this quarter are still pending, so far I have gotten all A’s in the first 6 classes and I’m hopeful that trend will continue with these last two. If it does, I will be graduating with a 3.79 GPA. Hey, I warned you that this was gonna be an ego trip didn’t I? As some comedy, I was looking through a grade report the other day. The worst grade I received in grad school was a B- in the one and only finance class I took. The humorous part is that my bachelor degree is in Finance. Whoops!

So how does it feel to be done? Well, since I spent pretty much all of my free time Monday, Tuesday, and early Wednesday studying and then stayed up till 2 last night celebrating, right now it just feels tired. As I have found to be the case with most long-term things, it takes a while to sink in once it's finally over so I know the full force hasn't really hit me yet. I do know that overall I am more proud of getting this degree than my undergrad. Not because I think it's more prestigious or anything, but because I feel like I worked harder, learned more, and really truly earned this one. Then there's also just the fact of how much longer it took me to complete this. All told, I was only at U of I for 3 years and 4 months while my time at Depaul stretched from 9/01 - 6/07. So, basically, it took me 2 and a half years longer. But probably the biggest part of it is this overriding feeling that this degree was all for me. Certainly, the undergrad was "for me" as well, but there was a certain element where it just felt like it was the next step after high school rather than a conscious decision I was making about my future. But deciding to go to grad school was completely my decision; there were no expectations for me to do it and no pressure to keep going once I started other than the pressure I put on myself. It feels really gratifying to have set a long-term goal for myself and achieved it on my own (with the exception of some monetary assistance from Kemper, HSBC, and BCBS).

So now I am done and left wondering, “OK, what next?” Well, I am looking no further than 29 days from now when Christy and I are heading back to Hawaii for 8 days. Beyond that, I’ll worry about the rest in September.

Here the ego trip ends.