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When I finished my Bachelor in an economic related field, I pledged myself to never again bear the time-consuming and exhausting challenge of combining a full-time study programme with extensive part-time work. I was fed up with not having time for myself and/or my beloved ones, fed up with learning and especially with research. So, I started my career and felt very comfortable with all the free-time and a regular wage. Visiting football games, having time for short leaves, simply enjoying life as an employee.
Surprisingly, it did not take long until the inner unrest returned, “Martin, you are way too young to stop progressing in education”, “Martin, in how far does this FIFA match path your way to the career you are hoping to have?”. Finally, one day my intrinsic motivation prevailed and I started my search for a suitable next step in education. Germany´s (private) university offers are various, but at the end Frankfurt School, with its good reputation (in general and from experience of a personal friend) and the new campus, won.
Now – Here I am. Having survived Semester one, what have I done so far? To name a few: I re-gathered the do`s and don’ts of financial accounting, learned about the positive and negative aspects of decentralisation and other managerial constructs and prepared a presentation about the current ECB monetary policy. What haven´t I done? Played a game of FIFA or visited the gym. Studying part-time next to a full-time job is challenging and requires a lot of dedication. On average 20 hours per week should be invested to fully benefit from the topics and lectures and to extract the amount of information required for progress in one’s professional career. BUT, it´s also fun. The first weeks were dominated by several group assignments, some more, some less challenging, some more, some less fun, but all of them intensified the group feeling. Even for introverted people like me, Frankfurt School’s learning approach makes it easy to get to know your peers quickly. Starting with the leadership camp at Lufthansa Seeheim, where we learned about group dynamics and got an idea of leadership and progress as a team. The (intended) side-effect was getting to know the future peers in person and to see how fast a young and ambitious group of people can make progress. Mixed team projects and extensive collaboration during classes increased the comfort within the new network.
When it comes to learning and research next to a full-time job, I guess, everyone has to find his or her own way to get around with the workload. For me it helped to define certain fixed study times and to keep detailed track of “to do´s”, “to read´s” and so on. Actually, my peers laugh at me, due to my predilection to summarise whatever we have to read or prepare, but at least it works for me. Of course, one has to also be willing to spend one or two nights studying, when there are projects due, but this simply belongs to the experience of a part-time MBA. However, after familiarising myself with studying again, I found some time to go to the gym and have fun with friends again. Life is good and studying part-time with FS was the right decision for me.
If you have questions about studying part-time with FS, workload or anything else, please feel free to contact me: martin.boelke@fs-students.de
Frankfurt School gGmbH
Adickesallee 32-34
60322 Frankfurt am Main
