Reem Wani
University of Phoenix
Master of business administration
Coming to the United States from Syria as an undergraduate in 2000, Reem Wani faced a difficult challenge: She spoke very little English in a demanding biology and chemistry program at the University of Akron. Yet she overcame the language barrier and went on to graduate in 2005, starting her career at a local laboratory.
It was then that Wani, 28, confronted another kind of barrier — the advancements she wanted to make in her company required an MBA, but going back to school seemed impossible.
“I work a lot of different shifts — first, second, third. I work at least 10 hours a day, sometimes 20 hours straight,” she says. “I thought,I don’t even have time to go back to school.”
Lured by the ads for University of Phoenix that promised to make it easy to earn an MBA in 18 months, Wani tentatively contacted the school for information and was pleasantly surprised.
“They made it really easy for me to go back,” she says. “They explained everything for the program and said, ‘We will help you.’ They held my hand on each step. I really needed someone to help me go back to school.”
Wani now takes one six-week course at a time, which meets once a week for four hours. She takes advantage of every pocket of time available — lunch breaks, after work, weekends and even before work, which can sometimes mean getting up at 3 a.m. — for reading and studying. “Whenever I have five minutes free, I try to study,” she says.
She still faces scheduling difficulties, such as the day that she worked 20 consecutive hours then headed straight to class, fueled by Red Bull and coffee.
Yet she’s on track to finish her MBA by next spring. Wani hopes her combination of a science background with an advanced business degree will enable her to reach a management level at her company.
“I’d like to be vice president of the company,” she says with a determined laugh.
While she initially didn’t tell many people she was going back to school (“I had the feeling that maybe I wouldn’t be able to continue,” she says), she’s now talking more about her efforts and finding her employer is very supportive.
“They’ve told me this is a good step for me,” she says.
Michael Caldwell
Case Western Reserve University
Certificate program in nonprofit management
Michael Caldwell spent nearly 30 years in a career in software engineering, automation and management. He’d started a company, Resolution Integration Solutions, grew it for 10 years, then sold it to Matrikon International in 2005. He’d traveled the world and raised a family.
At 58, Caldwell “was ready to hang it up and look for something new,” he says. Retirement didn’t quite fill the bill, so instead, he returned to school at Case Western Reserve University in 2008 to pursue a certificate in nonprofit management.
“When I sold the company, I didn’t have to work anymore,” he says. “But I’ve done enough engineering. I wanted to do something different and interesting. ... I didn’t want to do anything for-profit anymore.”
Instead, Caldwell plans to combine his new training from CWRU in nonprofit management with his business acumen and years of experience to help others in the community. He’s currently formulating plans to create a business incubator to help startups in Cleveland’s inner city, as well as a consulting firm to help nonprofits improve their business models.
With a business track record like Caldwell’s, it’s likely he could have pursued these new ventures without returning to college. But for him, heading back to school was a way to boost his local business network and learn how to translate his business knowledge for the nonprofit world. “The contacts I’ve been able to establish at Case have been everything I hoped for,” he says.
“I needed to learn the vocabulary of nonprofits,” says Caldwell. “I figured people would be saying, ‘You’re from the business world, you don’t understand nonprofits.’ ”
Most of the students in Caldwell’s classes are in their 20s and 30s, around the same age as his kids. But that’s a positive. “I like being with mostly younger people with new ideas, fresh ideas,” he says.
Unlike his younger classmates, Caldwell wasn’t driven by a desire for advancement, a boost in salary or that next big promotion.
“At the end of one of my semesters, the professor asked what grade I expected in her class,” remembers Caldwell. “I said, ‘Give me what you want, I don’t care. You did a good job of teaching me the material, and I got out of it what I was hoping for.’ I didn’t go back for grades.”
Until May, Caldwell remained on staff at Matrikon International as operations manager and was accustomed to working 15-plus hours a day. To accommodate his studies, he scaled back his work schedule to a mere eight hours — “a half-day,” he says — allowing him to head home to hit the books or attend evening classes.
“It was fun; much better than work,” he says. “You know what they say, a change is better than a rest.”
Tom Deiotte
John Carroll University
Masters of education in school counseling
After a dozen years working as a case manager with Cuyahoga County Child Protective Services, Tom Deiotte was ready for a change.
“Working in child protective services isn’t for everyone, and it takes a special kind of person to stay in that field,” he says. “I still wanted to work with children and families, but in a different context.”
Seeing childhood abuse and neglect spill over into the academic environment prompted him to consider tackling the problem from the opposite side of the classroom door by becoming a school counselor. The excellent reputation of John Carroll University in the educational fields and his positive experience as an undergrad at another Ohio Jesuit school, Xavier University, prompted him to enroll in JCU last fall to pursue an advanced degree in education for school counseling.
Making it work has required a delicate balance of schedules between Deiotte and his wife, a teacher who just finished a master’s degree at the University of Akron. He switched to part-time, weekend hours with Child Protective Services, leaving weekdays open for evening classes and required in-school observation time.
Being home during the week makes him primary caregiver to his 9-, 7- and 6-year-old daughters, so peak study hours are early mornings and evenings when the kids are sleeping.
He commutes to John Carroll from Marshallville, in Wayne County, three evenings a week for three-hour classes.
Deiotte is receiving partial tuition reimbursement from Cuyahoga County Child Protective Services, but both he and his wife have taken student loans to help ease the financial burden.
Accommodating school with a busy work and family life has meant sacrifices for Deiotte. Classes have replaced his recreational basketball league. Work now takes the place of weekend leisure time with his family. And forget being able to watch the Indians on TV on weeknights.
But it’s precisely those sacrifices that have made Deiotte a much better student this time around than he was as an undergrad.
“I appreciate it so much more now than I did when I was 18 and going off to college,” he says. “I used to cram the night before tests. I took it for granted. Now I realize how important [education] is.”
And when it all seems overwhelming, there’s one image Deiotte holds in his mind as the reward for his efforts.
“It’s one day attending the graduations of kids I’ve helped make it through school,” he says. “My big reward will be having a student come up to me and say thank you for listening. I’ll just be standing there with a big grin on my face.”
Hadanely Solorio-Martinez
Baldwin-Wallace College
Bachelor of Arts in Accounting and Human Resources
Hadanely Solorio-Martinez’s path to a bachelor’s degree has been filled with slowdowns and roadblocks to rival the Innerbelt.
After immigrating to Northeast Ohio from Mexico eight years ago, she picked up credits from both Tri-C and Cleveland State with the intention of getting a degree in international business, but she never finished.
After marrying and having a baby, that degree seemed to drift even farther from her reach. “I wanted to finish my degree, but I thought it would be impossible because of my new life,” she says.
In the meantime, Solorio-Martinez had started working as a bookkeeper for Fogg Corporate Properties. There, she found a passion for numbers that reignited the desire to finish her degree.
Her boss was a Baldwin-Wallace College graduate who encouraged her to consider his alma mater. The company even offered to pay her tuition in full.
It was an offer she couldn’t refuse, and last fall she enrolled at B-W to pursue a double major in accounting and human resources, with plans to continue on for an MBA.
Yet the challenges of returning to school with a full-time job and a young child — her daughter is now 18 months — have been just as real as she expected. During most lunch breaks, Solorio-Martinez can be found alone in Fogg’s office storage room with her homework and a packed lunch. Three nights a week she goes straight from work to class, returning home after her daughter has gone to bed.
She often stays up as late as 2 a.m. studying, then catches a few hours of sleep before getting up for more studying at 5:30 a.m. In her spare time, she’s often occupied with helping her parents, who do not speak English, get to doctor’s appointments and pay their bills.
“Thankfully, I have a lot of support from my family,” she says. “If I didn’t, I don’t think I would make it.”
She’s also relied on another essential skill — time management. “It’s easy to say it, but hard to make it work,” says Solorio-Martinez. “I always have my agenda, I always have to write down what I need to do. And when I’m at school, I try to focus only on that.”
She’ll complete her bachelor’s degree in May 2010, then will begin graduate studies with a goal of sitting for the Certified Public Accountant exam in 2011 or 2012. Along with such accomplishments will come increased salary potential and a secured position in her company, but that’s not what keeps her going.
Rather, she’s proud of her ability to support her family, to make her parents proud of her and, most importantly, “I want my daughter to be proud of me,” she says. “That’s my No. 1 reason.”
BACK-TO-SCHOOL TIPS:
Weigh online vs. on-campus courses.Online MBA programs would be ideal for someone with Wani’s schedule, says Richard Spinner, campus college chair for the University of Phoenix. Though she considered that option, Wani went the more traditional route. “I like to see a teacher in front of me,” she says. “I always like to ask a lot of questions.” Another advantage? “Coming to campus gives her the opportunity to network,” says Spinner.
Become an efficient reader. “There’s a ton of reading at the master’s level, so you have to learn to read very efficiently,” says Spinner. “The first six to eight weeks will be tough, but the longer you go in class, the more efficient you will become.”
Find snippets of study time. “I see a lot of people sitting in the car reviewing notes right before class,” says Winnie Gerhardt, director of adult and graduate admission at Baldwin-Wallace College. “It just takes those 10 minutes to reinforce your learning from the class before.”
Select adult programs. Students returning to school close to or in retirement should be careful to choose classes designed for adult learners rather than those geared toward 18-year-old undergraduates, says Cathy Mansor, dean of Hiram’s Weekend College. “Life experiences have to be fabricated for them [as classroom examples], while you have to draw on where you’ve already been,” she says. “That can be very difficult to relate to.”
Plan ahead. Slowly begin taking courses to time graduation around retirement, suggests Mansor, or retire first then return to the classroom. Either way, “spend some time thinking about what you want to do and what you can provide to other people,” says Caldwell.
Ditch practicality. Now’s the time to pursue subjects that interest you with an eye to a postretirement hobby or even second career. “If you’re dreading retirement, this might give you an enjoyable outlet that can ease that anxiety,” says Mansor.
Choose carefully. “Once you engage in a program and find it isn’t for you, you’ve already spent a lot of resources,” says Mark Storz, associate dean of graduate studies at John Carroll University. “Take time to research what you really want to do.”
Don’t forgo the student experience. Both Storz and Mansor encourage adult students to get engaged in the campus experience, despite their busy schedules. “If you’re not engaged on campus, you don’t tend to succeed at the same rate as someone who’s involved,” says Mansor. At Hiram, Weekend College students can even stay overnight in the residence halls in an effort to recreate that authentic student experience.
Know your FAFSA, aka Free Application for Federal Student Aid. A student returning to school for a graduate or undergraduate degree should start by completing the FAFSA at fafsa.ed.gov, recommends Karen Tijanich, manager of financial services for Lorain County Community College. Beware scams that charge fees to apply for financial aid.
Be realistic about the pace you can keep. “Adults do much better when they take one or two courses at a time,” says B-W’s Winnie Gerhardt. “You’ll get better grades, your family will still talk to you, and you won’t be so strung out all the time.”
Use available resources. Take advantage of all those resources you never used as an undergrad, recommends Gerhardt, such as career coaching, mentoring networks and informal chats over coffee with professors.