Why not full-time...

There is no news on the MBA front at all. The long weekend ended with an accident - I was changing lanes and a motorcycle came a hit my car on the side. After a 40 minute ordeal, I found out that the motorcycle rider did not have any insurance and although I checked for all blind spots before changing lane, the final verdict is yet to be issued.

With that crappy experience, more negative thoughts flooded my mind - things like how my insurance will be increased for next three years, I will be car-less for 10-15 days as it gets repaired, and the things I did wrong in the Haas interview.

That being said, I wanted to post my thoughts on the choice of full-time v/s part-time. For the longest time, I was conflicted between the full time v/s part time choices. Here is a list of my decision points.

• Career direction - I knew that I did not want to change my career completely. I am in my 30's and I like my industry but I know that I lack skills to move me forward in my career. I wanted an MBA to give me wider breadth of skills to take on more diverse roles in my organization.
• Career Stage - I know this may sound stupid. But I know that if I completely switch my career, I will have to almost again re-start my career to bring it to the point that it is today.
• immediate Knowledge Application - I have heard time and time again from part time MBA students that the things they learn in their class have enabled them to be more effective at work . In many cases, it seemed that these "little" extras have enabled them to move into the desired areas.
• Price tag - I realized that the cost of a ranked( top 20) full time MBA program is about 90-100K. The same is true for part time programs, however I figured that from the cost perspective, working while getting an MBA may allow me to have lesser debt.
• Multi-tasking costs - I usually try to do something or the other even with my day job. I also think that this is a good opportunity to get better at multi-tasking- something I will need as I "climb the ladder".
• Choice of Schools - Bay area has a good choice of schools like Haas, Tepper, and Wharton and there are some good distance choices like Duke, Chicago GSB, and UCLA.

These decision points will vary from person to person but the choice of why not full-time took me some time to make.