Why I Chose Santa Clara EMBA and What I Loved about it | Dawn McCale

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Hi, my name is Don Mchale and I am a mom to to really great kids. I am a vice president of sales with Trace three, a technology solution provider focused on delivering innovative and excellent solutions to our customers. I chose santa Clara because of course the prestige of going to Santa Clara University. I also was very intrigued by the caliber of students and the strong network that I would get coming out of the program and of course the location, the days and the times of the programs worked really, really well with my professional and personal schedule. Getting an MBA has always been a lifelong goal of mine and one of my mentors recently asked me why don't you do it now? And I, I thought about it for a second and I was actually flying back from a conference and it was in Mccarran airport in las Vegas and I logged in right there and started looking at programs in santa Clara popped up and I was really intrigued. I reached out to the admissions team and they helped walk me through the application process, walking me through the dates, the requirements they offered for me to meet with professors for the staff and faculty as well as current students and actually offered that I could sit in on one of the classes as well, which was really, really helpful for me. The application process was pretty simple and they made it really easy. One of the questions that I get asked most frequently about the program is how do you juggle work, school and family? And the simple truth is you just do, I think we're all type a personalities if you're looking at an NBA program and I think that just like fitting a family and would work, you just make it happen. So there were many nights when I was doing a homework along side of my kids are at the same time as my kids and we would often rotate our papers. My cohort and my teammates would work around our family, work and travel schedules, the scheduled meeting times as well. So at the beginning of each quarter, when you get your new set of classes and teachers, the professors would assign you to a new working team and the beauty of having a team to work in as you are able, just like you would at your office, you're able to leverage the strengths of each of the individuals that you're working with to make your team a better, better unit as a whole. My core team consisted of two people that were in sales and marketing and then two people that were an engineer and supply chain, so the four of us really must well and we really created a well rounded cohesive team and actually our team name, we called ourselves team cohesion because of that. So uh most of our projects and papers we we worked on together, there were a few times during different quarters where we uh mixed and got assigned different teams and so what would happen is each of the teams would come together just like you wouldn't work and determine what time slot would work best for that team. So There were some folks that had little kids and they wanted to not start working until after 8 30, There were some folks that had all their kids and wanted to be done by nine, so just depending on what people's schedules were, we made it work. So team cohesion met every Thursday from 8 to 10 and we would work on our papers or projects or just get together for a few minutes to check in and make sure everyone was doing well. Um and if we didn't have a lot to cover then we would just move on Another team. You just figure out a time when you just make it work and it's actually pretty easy and I will admit there were times when I was in a parking lot writing papers or in an airport or on an airplane reading case studies. I actually wrote a paper while I was in the parking lot waiting for my niece's wedding to start. I wrote a paper in shore lands parking lot while I was waiting for a concert to start so you just fit it in.