It’s been an incredible summer for me! I recently started as an Executive MBA student in grad school. After 13 years of working post-undergrad, it’s very thrilling (and occasionally overwhelming) to be a student again ;)

One of the coolest parts about this program is that we do various intensive weeks and global trips as part of the curriculum.

To launch us into the program, we recently did an intensive at Snowbird, a ski resort in Utah.

I am one of 73 people in the cohort. Twenty five percent of us are women.

Only a handful of us are writers or artists.

And the week was, as the name implies, intense.

Leading up to the intensive week, we immersed ourselves in two courses, one on effective teams and one on business ethics— hours of reading, watching videos and listening to podcasts, synthesizing information, analyzing case studies, writing papers, and engaging in discussion boards.

I poured a lot of energy into the material and was so excited to finally discuss all of the different ideas with my fellow cohort.

Cut to: we’re all sitting in the hotel conference room, nervous and excited, and one of our first tasks is to stand up in front of the group (around 80 people if you count the professor and staff) and share our brief bio. State our names, where we work, where we went to undergrad, etc.

I was shaking I was so nervous!

But I did it.

I spoke up, shared, and gradually over the course of the week felt much more confident about being there.

I was also very proud of a moment in the ethics class when I shared about an experience of sexual harassment in a previous workplace. It was highly uncomfortable to discuss that situation in a public setting but ultimately gave me so much relief and healing. These sorts of experiences are far too commonplace and as a woman it was powerful to shed light on that past trauma of mine in the hopes that others can do better to avoid those types of situations in the workplace.

Another amazing aspect of this program is that we move through all of the courses in a small team.

Unlike undergrad, which is largely individual, this program is meant to be experienced in a collaborative setting, a learning community.

I LOVED meeting my team and am so proud to be a part of our group.

It was also wonderful seeing the overall energy of the cohort as a whole relax over the course of the week. We focused a lot on how to build effective teams through empathy and psychological safety (something I’m so passionate about) and the EMBA program really brought those concepts to life.

I’m proud of myself for working through my nervousness and self-conscious feelings throughout the week and seeing in myself the leader that is emerging and evolving.

Very excited for this journey and stay tuned for more updates! Thanks as always for your support and for following along. More to come soon!