If this is your first time reading this series, please start at Part 1.
When Did I Realize Something Was Missing In My Professional Development?
I remember when it happened. I'm in a meeting going through a "doc" (please see this amazing breakdown from Satish Madhira regarding Amazon's Working Backwards Doc process) and some one asked me to support the doc with a cost-benefit analysis and the affect of this decision for 5 different teams, two vendors and a regulator. I was stumped. What does that even look like? How did I approach teams to develop this? Even though I forged ahead and got what I needed from the teams , it was a pure guess and a healthy Google that got me through. The following week, it was developing the strategy three years ahead for the program. There were many false starts, but a diagram (kudos to Loan Tran), some great team work (thank you Amendaze Thomas), and some elbow grease later, it was developed for our program review.
Unfortunately, this wasn't the first time this kind of thing happened. Ultimately, I got tired of scrambling after meetings, stumbling in confusion of the tech lexicon, and Googling business terms. It wasn't that it was hard to develop mechanisms to implement the theories that I had learned. It was worse than that. I didn't even have the fundamental concepts regarding these theories so I felt like I was doubly-behind. There were many more sessions where I'm wiping sweat from my brow as I tackled new concepts and juggled putting the pieces together.
Let's be clear. I was high-performing and I was fixing problems left and right. And I had gotten rid of the imposter syndrome that many people (especially women of color) feel in stepping into this new frontier after the sixth month. However, the more I succeeded, the more was expected, and the bigger the problems I stumbled upon to solve all while reporting to higher levels of leadership within the organization. By the summer, multiple teams and our regulators were looking to me for schedules, anticipated resources, influencing policy, and general direction while also balancing procuring vendor contracts that depended on this information.
As I stepped into being in charge of a workstream that had a pretty wide scope, I realized that I needed to be more proactive in my professional development. But I needed something more tangible to get me there.
So Why an Executive MBA?
In my two months of casual inquiry (interviewing colleagues that had gotten their full MBA and reviewing program curriculum), I realized that I need something more tangible than a Leadership Course, but less a commitment than a full Masters of Business Administration. I had a family and I couldn't jet off to a top-tier Ivy, and I wasn't in the mood to take a sabbatical from work to pursue this. To be frank, I'm currently interviewing MBA candidates to come into Amazon so it's not like my current job isn't already preferred by most MBA graduates. Thus, the Executive M.B.A structure fit me perfectly. It's usually between one to two years and geared towards a working professional that has already made career-based achievements but wanting to add another notch in their belt. This would level-set my understanding of basic terminology and give me the crash-course fundamentals for leadership. When reviewing the prospects out there in the field, I honed in on four major priorities:
Price - I did not want to pay an arm and a leg for a piece of paper. One of the biggest scams in my mind was the amount of money universities require for a degree with not a lot of guarantees coming out of it. The prospect of a better job or being automatically qualified for a higher position was also not a necessity for me. So I didn't necessarily want to "pay to play."
The Right Curriculum - I knew that Entrepreneurship, Strategy, Data Analytics, and Finance were what I really required. As I forecasted my progression in tech, these fundamental skills kept coming up. Even though I had Finance and Statistics as electives at UMD, I needed a 2020 upgrade.
The Right Network/ Demographic of Fellow Students - When I left the "Big Four", one of the hardest aspects of the leaving the field was shifting my network. I had built up 8 years of a community in accounting/consulting. Shifting to tech left only a few connections as I entered a brand new world (queue the Aladdin music). Some of these former colleagues and classmates helped me to prep for my interview. Some just gave me perspective and confidence that I could take what I built at EY and carry it to this industry. What I was missing was my social "arsenal" of experience and breadth. I wanted a program that catered to personnel that were either already in tech or dabbling in the industry so I could rebuild my network properly.
Flexibility - If you asked me, the minimum time spent scheduled in the classroom staring at a projector, the better. This was not only because of my decision to start a family in 2018 (though it helped). My travel-heavy job was a top priority and I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to be penalized accordingly. Pre-COVID, I was in Seattle once a month and with family obligations, I didn't want to be completely stuck in a classroom.
I wish the story was I chose Quantic after determining these priorities, but I was still at a loss and didn't really know where to go. My halfhearted research also yield discouraging results. I thought that my requirements might be unrealistic and perhaps the typical pursuit of higher education wasn't going to be for me. Then, something unexpected popped into my LinkedIn mailbox...
To Be Continued (Part 3 Coming Soon)
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