Thinking MBA? Meet Three Women Who Are Glad They Did It

“Five years out [of business school], my future prospects are much greater and more open than if I settled in and stayed at my old firm,” Estrella explains. At Michigan, Estrella says some of the most valuable lessons she learned were in finance and teamwork. She also developed a great network of peers and professionals. “I have friends from business school almost in every industry and at major companies,” she says. “Yet, much more than that, my life is much more interesting and rich for the experience and the collateral experiences that have sprung out of it.”

Patti Tom

Patti Tom, who worked as the editor of a trade publication, was looking for a new challenge and interested in the business side of publishing. “To some extent, I felt that being able to ‘talk the talk’ would earn me more respect from the financial people in my company,” she says.

She attended Georgia State University’s part-time program, while continuing in her job. The good new is that her company paid 80 percent of her tuition as long as she made As. The bad news: Her life during that period was so busy that she felt stretched to the limit.

During her first year, Tom only took one class per semester but quickly realized “at that pace, it would take me forever to finish,” she says. So three years into the program, which took her three and a half years to complete, Tom was taking three classes each semester. “That meant I had nearly no social life,” she says. “In that last year, I felt like I was not doing either my job or school work to the best of my abilities, but was doing what I could to get by. It wasn’t the best scenario, and I wouldn’t recommend doing it that way again.”

Has she been able to do things differently in her career with an MBA? Tom says no. She still works on the editorial side of a trade publication, though she is in a new job in California. “I believe an MBA helps introduce you to business and management concepts, but someone could just as easily learn that information on the job,” she says.