Juggling fatherhood with an MBA
Working from home, supporting your spouse in her career, raising two young children and completing an MBA, all at the same time, requires some serious time management – but it is very rewarding.
In the summer of 2020, with a world of uncertainty swirling outside, I finalized my application for the Executive program at UF MBA. My wife, Stephani, sat next to me as I did so, two months pregnant with our second child, and gave me the ‘thumbs up’. “We will make this work. We will figure it out as we go.” The decision was the culmination of a lot of pre-COVID research that, like most everything else, had been put on hold in early 2020 as we tried to make sense of COVID-19’s impact on our lives. However, despite the relative unknowns of a pandemic, it was the right time for me to go back to school.
Stephani’s words of encouragement propelled me forward then and every day since – a part-time MBA wouldn’t be possible in my house without the support of my wife and extended family. Our second child was born the week before final exams of our second term. Two young children require a lot of time and attention, and so do two parents with full-time careers!
In my situation, finding time to study and prepare for exams means waking up before the kids wake up, staying up after the kids are asleep and the day’s chores are complete, and really taking advantage of the few hours of quiet time found on weekend days. That may sound obvious, but since I transitioned from fully in-the-office to fully remote in March of 2020, this now means a lot of time spent in the same spot in my home: in front of the computer. Fortunately, when things get tough, I have two little helpers aged 3 years and 4 months!
The EMBA program has encouraged my family to consider in much greater detail how we spend our time. Yes, there are a lot of personal sacrifices made in pursuit of this degree (my poor Xbox doesn’t remember what it’s like to powered on), but together my family committed to the clear purpose of opening doors of opportunity in my career while meeting like-minded, curious professionals who seek the same thing, too. And the student cohort has been a great support system through the wild times of our pandemic-stricken world. Many of us share similar experiences with things like school or office closures, deferring much-needed vacations, children barging into our sacred workspaces, or commiserating about the side effects of the vaccine.
One thing is certain – time is flying. I am writing this at the midpoint of the 21-month program, but it feels like we just started yesterday. I would encourage anyone who is interested in a part-time MBA to step back and consider the pace of change in the world around us. If you think it’s time to start your MBA journey, there is no time like the present! One of the great challenges of the MBA is stepping out of your comfort zone and pushing the limits of what you think are capable. You will probably surprise yourself.
