From Liberal Arts Degree to MBA jobs in IT

I’ve always considered myself to be a huge computer science nerd. While all my childhood friends were outside playing football, I was busy installing DOS on my first computer. And when I should have been writing book reports, I was, instead, blogging on Prodigy - before blogging was even a thing!

But I never thought I’d get a chance to actually pursue a job in my computer science passions. Not with the scarlet letter that I wore ever since college…a liberal arts degree. No CS major, no options for tech jobs, I always assumed.

So instead, I started my career as a kindergarten  teacher. And though I’d try to find outlets for my geekdom – building a class website, teaching my students PowerPoint – I figured that was as close to any tech jobs as I was ever going to get.

As the years passed though, I could never fully get the idea of the many possibilities of tech jobs out of my head. Each incredible innovation – PDAs, MP3 players, smartphones – was like a fresh taunt from the other side: "Hey, how cool would it be to work on me?" And like Poe's telltale heart, the idea began to beat louder and louder in my thoughts until I finally broke down and asked a friend in the tech sector for advice.

One friend, a computer scientist by training, took pity on a poor, pathetic liberal arts major and offered this nugget: "I don't know much about the non-technical side of things but an awful lot of folks over there seem to have an MBA in IT..."

That seed, planted innocuously in my mind, quickly began to germinate. Before I knew it, I was on the road to my own MBA in IT: signing-up for the GMAT, researching top business schools, and trying to figure out what ‘net present value’ and ‘supply chains’ were all about. In the end, I was lucky enough to snag a spot at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, chosen because it seemed like a collaborative, down-to-earth place where an ex-kindergarten teacher might just be able to fit into an MBA in IT program.