Why I Put MBA After My Name

For the past couple of newsletters, I’ve teased you about something.

Why do I put MBA after my name?

It isn’t because I think it makes me more important. It isn’t because I believe a degree makes someone smarter, wiser, or more worthy than someone without one.

I put those three letters there because I know exactly what it took for me to earn them.

And that story begins a long time ago.

I Knew There Had to Be a Bigger World

When I was a freshman in high school, I was miserable.

I didn’t like my school. I didn’t particularly like the town where I lived. There were certainly good people there—people I liked and cared about—but even as a teenager, I found much of the culture around me small-minded.

I saw people cling tightly to religion while racism existed alongside it. I saw very limited expectations for girls. A woman might become a teacher or a nurse, perhaps, but the preferred trajectory seemed fairly clear:

Find a man. Get married. Have children.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing that life.

I simply knew it wasn’t the only life available to me.

I had a part-time job in another, more urban community, and through it I began meeting people I never would have encountered in my hometown.

One of them was a young Jewish coworker who became a good friend. Her family was wealthy and well connected in Democratic and business circles in Indianapolis.

The first time she invited me to her family’s large home on the north side of Indianapolis, I felt as though I had entered another world.

I remember sitting down to an elegant dinner at a beautiful, formal table. I was terribly nervous.

The family had household help—a Black woman who cooked and served the meal, something that itself reflected a racial and economic hierarchy I was only beginning to understand.

Then, at the end of this very formal dinner, my friend’s father asked her to bring out a box of ice cream bars from the freezer.

She brought the box to the table.

He took one and passed the box around.

And suddenly this intimidating, elegant dinner became wonderfully ordinary.

That evening stayed with me.

The Rooms I Wanted to Be In

I visited that house many times afterward.

Sometimes the family would have a party, and their enormous formal living room would be filled with businesspeople and people involved in liberal politics. I won’t mention names, but some were influential people.

They talked.

Really talked.

They discussed politics, current events, business and what was happening in the world.

And yes, sometimes they did it while drinking wine and passing around a joint—which was rather startling to teenage me.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in that enormous house, life was happening at completely different stages.

My friend’s brother would be in his room with his friends, going through his huge record collection and deciding what to play next.

Her younger sister might have a little friend spending the night, surrounded by what seemed like every doll imaginable.

My friend and I would wander from room to room.

And I often found myself drifting back toward that formal living room.

I wanted to hear what the adults were talking about.

I wanted to listen.

I wanted to learn.

I wanted to understand this larger world I was beginning to discover.

Those experiences mattered enormously because they occurred during my formative years. They showed me a world of ideas, education and conversation that I wasn’t finding in my own community.

I began to understand that the world was much larger than the one I had been given.

But College Wasn’t Part of the Plan

My mother was relatively open-minded, but my father was a blue-collar union worker who believed strongly in the dignity of earning a good living through work.

And he did.

He had good wages and benefits.

But he saw college as largely unnecessary—almost self-indulgent. His philosophy was simple: get a good job, work hard and make a living.

I wanted something different.

I even begged my parents to let me attend what was then called Park Tutor in Indianapolis. I had collected information about the school and studied its curriculum. It offered classes that fascinated me and weren’t available at my high school.

They said no.

By then, I had increasingly little in common with many of the girls I’d grown up with. Their interests simply weren’t mine. Interestingly, many of my friends were boys because I could have conversations with them that I wasn’t having with the girls around me.

I was serious.

Restless.

Curious.

And pretty lost.

Then Life Took a Detour

By my senior year, the Vietnam War was raging.

There was tremendous turmoil in the country, and some of that turmoil reached my community. Suspicion surrounded young people considered liberal, antiwar or involved with drugs.

I got caught up in some of it.

At 17, just a couple of months before my 18th birthday, I dropped out of high school—even though I had been a good student—and left the United States for Canada with a young man.

Eventually we married. It was a short marriage, more of convenience than anything else.

When I returned home, I did something important.

I finished high school through night school and earned my diploma.

Then I started thinking about college again.

On my own, I got information about attending Indiana University. I visited the administration. I gathered everything I needed.

There was one major problem.

I didn’t have the money.

And my father remained adamantly opposed.

He continued encouraging me toward factory jobs instead.

So life moved on.

Four Classes Changed Something in Me

I went to beauty school. I became a hairdresser. I married. I had my daughter.

During that marriage, I had a neighbor who was working on her PhD.

She encouraged me to try community college.

By then, something had happened to the girl who once wanted so desperately to learn:

I had become afraid of college.

I had convinced myself I couldn’t do it.

But somehow I enrolled.

I was dealing with a difficult marriage. I had a small child. And I worked very hard.

I took four classes.

I got A’s in all four.

Something shifted.

Maybe I could do this after all.

Then came divorce, moving home and another interruption.

But education had gotten hold of me by then.

Eventually, while working full-time as a hairdresser, remarried and raising a child, I returned to school.

This time I was determined to study something that could lead to a solid career.

I chose computer technology.

I earned my associate degree and landed a co-op position with a major corporation. It came with good pay and benefits, and for several years I thought perhaps that was enough.

Then one day my boss—a woman who didn’t have a college degree herself—said something almost casually:

“You know, you really should go ahead and get that bachelor’s degree.”

I hadn’t been talking about going back to school.

I wasn’t planning it.

But that sentence lodged itself somewhere in my brain.

So I went back.

Again.

And eventually I earned my bachelor’s degree.

“So I Guess You Know It All Now.”

My husband went to my graduation ceremony.

No other family member came.

My mother gave me a little gold bracelet.

And my father?

After everything it had taken—the years, the interruptions, working, raising my daughter, marriages, divorce, starting over and repeatedly finding my way back to a classroom—his response was:

“So I guess you know it all now.”

I’ve never forgotten it.

Words have staying power.

So does the absence of words we desperately needed to hear.

I wish he had said, “I’m proud of you.”

But he didn’t.

Life continued.

And so did I.

I became increasingly interested in business and decided I wasn’t finished learning.

While working, I went back to school yet again.

And eventually I earned my Master of Business Administration.

MBA.

Three little letters.

Except they aren’t little to me.

That’s Why I Use Them

My education didn’t happen in one lovely, uninterrupted four-year experience with parents helping me pack for college, sending me care packages and cheering from the audience at graduation.

Mine came in pieces.

Education.

Stop.

Life.

Education.

Stop.

Marriage.

Work.

Motherhood.

Divorce.

Education.

Career.

More education.

Keep going.

My mother was largely ambivalent about my education. My father actively resisted it. My husband supported me.

But ultimately, I had to want it enough for myself.

And I did.

So yes, I am proud of those letters.

MBA.

I earned them.

Not because having a degree makes me better than anyone else. It doesn’t.

Some of the wisest and most intellectually curious people I’ve known never accumulated letters after their names.

Education doesn’t belong exclusively to universities.

You can study history because history fascinates you. Learn astronomy because you want to understand the night sky. Study philosophy, science, art, politics, technology, literature or another language simply because there is more in this world you want to know.

You can earn a certificate at 40.

Finish a degree at 50.

Take your first college class at 60.

Learn something entirely new at 70—or 80.

There is no expiration date on curiosity.

And perhaps that’s the part of my story that matters most.

That teenage girl sitting quietly in someone else’s living room, listening to adults discuss ideas she had rarely heard discussed at home, had discovered something.

There were more rooms in the world.

More conversations.

More ideas.

More things to know.

She wanted into those rooms.

It took her a while.

But she got there.

Support Someone Who Wants to Learn

If there is someone in your life trying to get an education, learn a trade, earn a certification, finish a degree or simply stretch their mind in a new direction, please encourage them.

Especially when their path doesn’t look conventional.

Especially when they’re older.

Especially when life has interrupted them before.

And especially when they’re frightened they aren’t smart enough to do it.

Sometimes one person’s simple sentence—“You really should go ahead and do this”—can change the trajectory of another person’s life.

I know.

It happened to me.

And to those of you who keep opening these newsletters, reading my stories, considering my ideas, sharing your own thoughts and traveling along with me: thank you.

Your time matters to me. I’m grateful that you spend some of it here.

If this story made you think of someone, please share it with them. And if someone shared this newsletter with you, I hope you’ll subscribe and join us.

There are still more rooms to enter.

And I still have a lot I want to learn.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

The Mindful Activist