Balancing Work and Your Education: Meet Suzanne Wnek
An MBA program with classrooms on the Booz Allen campus was the right choice for Wnek’s educational goals.
“My flexible work schedule involves shifting my hours so that I can start my workday earlier, and I also telework two or three days each week,” says Booz Allen Hamilton senior consultant Suzanne Wnek.
Wnek appreciates those scheduling options because she is enrolled as a part-time student in the Johns Hopkins University MBA program, which meets at the Booz Allen campus in McLean, Virginia. She also works full time at the firm as a research analyst, providing market research and competitive intelligence analysis.
“My greatest challenge is learning to prioritize,” Wnek says. “Each class in our MBA program brings a different set of challenges: In-class exams, team projects, presentations, and other creative assignments. At the same time, my employment workload is unpredictable, which means that a major project for both work and school can be due at the same time.”
But Wnek has successfully tackled other challenges since joining Booz Allen in 2005, and one of her motivations for earning the MBA is to strengthen her analytical and leadership skills so that she can to enhance her contributions to her team. The firm’s FlexWork options aid her in balancing a schedule that changes often.
Wnek explains, “Booz Allen’s commitment to education, telework policies, and to me has been invaluable in helping me meet my responsibilities. While I maintain my normal commitments to my clients and teammates, my flexible schedule allows me to save hours in traffic and be much more productive with that ‘found’ time. I can maximize my days in the office with meetings, and use my time teleworking from home for doing research. In addition, the time I save when I don’t commute allows me to meet my homework obligations, which can run as much as 10 hours a week.
“I evaluated a lot of programs before selecting this one,” she continues. “It takes 3.5 years to complete, but each class is 9 weeks long and meets for a few hours one day a week. Although this can be intense, the pace is generally sufficient to grasp the subject matter and gain some expertise.”
She believes that the pace also allows students to make the most of the Booz Allen educational credit: The firm reimburses educational costs of up to $5,000 per year to qualified staff members, and the Johns Hopkins program is spread over four years. The weekday schedule, says Wnek, also allows students to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.
“Students get married, have children, and care for older parents without having to give up weekends for classes the way that they would have to with other programs,” she says. “But students also have to make periodic sacrifices for classwork, including adjusting schedules so that teams can meet together. Our instructors are drawn from both the academic and private sector, so they usually have a good understanding of client demands on our schedules and are reasonably flexible.”
Wnek hopes to complete her degree in March 2010.
profile posted October 30, 2008
