The End of the MBA

Wow.

It’s hard to believe it, but this past weekend was my very last MBA weekend. All done. Finished. Finito. Never again will I have to get up at 8:30am on a Saturday and spend all day sitting in class. Never again will I have to stay up the night before an assignment is due, furiously typing away and flipping through the course reader for something to quote.

For all the sacrifice that the MBA required, I have to say that it was a great experience and I would do it again in a heartbeat. One of the best things about the MBA was the people that I met and learned from throughout the two years. Since we were broken into two different sections of about 34 students and stayed in those sections for 80% of the classes, I really got to know some of my classmates (and their industries) very well. It was the real life examples that supported or contradicted class teachings that really made the MBA valuable for me. So if any of my classmates are reading this, I’d just like to say thanks.

I may have gotten a bit disillusioned about the academic process in Europe, and I may have started to unravel and get burned out toward the end, but I am very proud of having finished the program and having done so while holding down a full-time job. I really am looking forward to applying the theoretical knowledge I have had over the past two years.

I have to admit, I got a little teary in my last class. I can’t help it, I’m just a sentimental American. It’s so rare when you are in such formal structures like a school program, where you know the exact beginning, middle, and end, and you have the luxury of knowing the end when it comes. I looked around and thought to myself, “This group of people will never be together again like this ever again.” It was a brief period in time, and now it is over and can never be recaptured. It’s just one of those milestones you go through. I thought I was finished with this kind of thing when I graduated college, but I am happy to have had one more formal education experience. My goal now is to make the investment pay off, and to keep learning.

Thank you to all the friends who helped me get through these past two years. To my classmates who sometimes carried me through. To Ann who always supported me and made sure I did my homework. To my parents for giving me the initial inspiration and the financial support to go to graduate school… thank you all.

Best wishes for the rest of your lives. I’m sure I will see some of you in the FT or WSJ headlines at some point (hopefully not for accounting scandals). It was a great time and I had a lot of fun and learned a lot. I couldn’t have asked for more from my peers.

Cheers to your future successes.