Sea Salt and the Professional UF MBA Workload

The Working Professional UF MBA Program goes in rhythms of demand. One week, I'm takin' it easy - I get home from work each night, pop open a Jai Alai IPA, go through the motions of my daughter not eating her peas, and search for a respectable movie to watch on Netflix Online (only to find that after an hour, there are no respectable movies on Netflix, and re-runs of Arrested Development or weird, low-budget documentaries would have to suffice).

The next week, I'm going to the Hyppo Cafe every night, sucking down espresso and working on cases, studying for tests or preparing for presentations. Of course, every time there's a busy week at school, it never fails - it is a more demanding week at work.

The combination of these two stresses, and the associated neglect of your family, real social relationships, and fake social relationships (Facebook) that come with it, makes life tricky for a while, especially for us diligent, really-want-to-learn-stuff types.

But you figure it out. For my little family, it was all about finding the breaking point, and going until going any more would result in divorce, a teenage girl that has no self-esteem or Tombstone frozen pizzas (Freschetta pies do not constitute the breaking point - I mean, the sauce is made with sea salt and olive oil). After just barely avoiding a nasty divorce every month, I'm back to playing throw-my-daughter-up-in-the-air-until-my-wife-tells-me-it's-too-high, and other fun games of that nature.

Of course, each professor's workload is different. Most have quizzes every class session, most have various case studies you need to report on, and most have an end-the-term presentation required (in addition to, or replacement of, a final).

In the Working Professional program, you take three classes per term - two, three-credit courses, and one, one-credit course, like Professional Writing or Personal Finance. There's also two weeks when you have to be on campus - the first week, for orientation/foundations review, and the elective week. Alternatively, instead of spending an elective week in Gainesville learning about negotiation tactics or how to construct a business plan, you could do a global immersion. This is where you pay a good amount of cash to spend the week someplace much more glorious and businessy than Gainesville, FL.

No offense to the beautiful town of Gainesville, with its quaint downtown, its hipster restaurants and eccentric homeless people, but when I think of an epicenter of industry or a business capital of a market, Gainesville, FL just doesn't cry Silicon Valley. But maybe it's just me.

I wanted to go on one of these trips, but at an estimated $5,000ish, I couldn't afford it (I don't work for Lockheed Martin. Aww snap!). Although a trip to Dubai or Buenos Aires sounded like a blast (oh yah - and a great opportunity for learning), my wife convinced me - through the negotiation tactics that I had yet to learn - that we should use the money instead to go on a family trip to Yosemite or Acadia NP after graduation. She had me at Yos..., and I quickly signed up for negotiation class. At least in the negotiation elective, I thought, I'd be able to defend against my wife's unprecedented ability to convince me of just about anything.