Pursuing My Mba

Pursuing my MBA

I remember the day as if it was yesterday. July 27, 1998. Ernie Castillo called me into his office, shut the door, and asked me to take a seat. He said, "Laura I am going to be honest with you, this just isn't working out, we're going to have to let you go." I sat there with tears in my eyes and a bewildered look on my face. I had just been fired. All I could think about was what am I going to do? How will I take care of my son (who was 6 years old at the time)? After going through the "motions", I decided I was going to go back to school. Although I had some work experience, I did not have a college degree, which I felt stopped me from receiving higher paying jobs. I felt that if I went back to school I would be able to make myself more marketable.

In August 1998, I enrolled in City College of San Francisco. I had been out of school for over 10 years and I was very apprehensive about returning. Since it had been such a substantial amount of time that I attended school, I was able to clean up my record. Therefore, my transcripts were free of all low scores I had received in the past. I attended CCSF for 1 year and obtained my Associates of Arts degree, as well, as a certificate in Health Care Technology. I then transferred to San Francisco State University.

Upon entering into San Francisco State University, I chose to major in Kinesiology. As I continued my studies, I decided to change my major to Health Science. I received a Bachelors of Science degree in 2003 from SFSU. Although my plans were to pursue a career in Health Science, I had to put them on hold due to the birth of my second child, who was born in September 2002. After I had my daughter, I had some decision making to do. I had to decide if I would put my daughter in day care and go into the workforce or stay at home and raise her.

I knew that this was a life altering decision so instead of acting on intuition, I decided to take a strategic approach when making my decision. As pointed out by Bazerman (1994, p4) decision-making should be approached by a more systematic and calculating approach. He list 6 steps to decision making:

1. Define the problem, characterizing the general purpose of your decision.

2. Identify the criteria, specifying the goals or objectives that you want to be able to accomplish.

3. Weight the criteria, deciding the relative importance