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Vice President of IT Services, Avineon

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By Katie Ford

“I was with 20 high-level executives, and we conducted great discussions in class,” she says. “I wanted to learn how people in other companies addressed or managed similar issues that I was having in business.”

Students met once a week for a full day, alternating Fridays and Saturdays, for two years. Choung took two classes a semester; the morning classes were quantitative (such as accounting), and the afternoon classes were qualitative (for example, organizational behavior or leadership). In the summer, students participated in a two-week international residency, in which they had the opportunity to consult with real companies. Using her vacation time, Choung did her residency in Beijing and Shanghai , China . She finished her MBA program in May.

Choung points out that in graduate school you are able to correlate classroom learning to real-life situations, whereas undergraduate school is more about learning theories.

“And you learn not only from your professors, but through your classmates and their professional careers and experiences,” she says. “You build close relationships in your class, because you're divided into teams to work on projects. Even after graduating, we still meet to socialize and bounce business ventures and other ideas off each other. Some of my classmates are starting businesses, and there are always possibilities for business relationships moving forward.”

Choung doesn't pretend that juggling graduate school with a full-time job is easy. Her work and studies often kept her busy seven days a week, particularly in the first year of the MBA program.

“You have to be a self-starter. No one is going to hold your hand,” she says. “At this point in our career and educational experience, it is not about getting a 4.0 but the learning process. But for those who want to do it, I recommend just going for it, because it's very rewarding in the end.”

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