Some graduate programs take over your life in that they are so demanding of your time, all you find yourself doing is working on classes, papers, and research pertaining to said degree. Then there are MBA programs. MBA programs take over your life in that they simply erase everything that you had going on and give you brand new, MBA-centric replacements. New friends, new hobbies, new routines, and, obviously, new responsibilities inside and outside the classroom.
To write the Great American MBA Novel is no mean feat and would require (irony of ironies) more free time than one could ever possibly get while actually in an MBA program. Instead, I want to focus on the specific changes I’ve seen in returning back to school. I’ve done the math. I’ve been in school from 1989 – 2009 and now again in 2014. The comparison points that are especially useful are 2005 (my last year of high school), 2009 (my last year of college), and now obviously 2014. Those are admittedly convenient benchmark years in my own life, but it turns out, they actually characterize stages of technological advancement fairly well, too.