Is It Financially Possible to do a Full Time MBA With a Family?

Also - San Diego Sitreps Meetup, Sitreps Jobs

Good Evening Weekly Sitreps Readers -

I am back from San Diego today and am happy to report that we had a great Sitreps meetup at the Pizza Port in Carlsbad. I am former Army, and as such I get a lot of Army followers. So it was really awesome to have a meetup in Carlsbad and get to meet some of the Navy and Marine Corp fans! I am always really grateful for the support of the community and never take it for granted. So thank you for coming out!

I was in San Diego to meet up with the team that supports me (yes Sitreps is a team sport) and talk about how we are going to take Sitreps to the next level in 2025. San Diego is shockingly beautiful. I can not believe the Navy and Marine Corp get this area for a duty station.

For this week I was going to write about the challenges of working in tech as an individual contributor and seeking manager/leadership roles. However, that article was just getting way to long and needed more thought. As such I will publish that next week. For this week, I want to help answer a very common question that I get about the complexities of doing an MBA with a family. I was doing an AMA on the flight out to San Diego and had a couple of followers ask this question, so let me give my perspective on how I did it, and how you can do it.

I do recognize that not all of this content can be exclusively focused on the MBA. So I promise next week we will have a more general career topic to go through.

This next week though I will be traveling again. This time I will be heading to Emory school of business to be their keynote speaker for the salute to service event on November 8th. Register here if you want to attend!

Articles I found Interesting Last Week

WSJ - The Nerdy Gamers Who Became Ukraine’s Deadliest Drone Pilots

WSJ - Fed Prepares Rate Cut Amid Economic Contradictions

WSJ - The Mysterious Fees Inflating Your Grocery Bill

Vox - Why the Pentagon just can’t quit Elon Musk

The Guardian - Dead-heat poll results are astonishing – and improbable, these experts say

Sitreps Job Postings!

Check out our latest job postings here! Most of these roles are focused on Defense Tech. Shoot us an application and if we think it is a good fit we will reach out.

Is It Financially Possible to do a Full Time MBA With a Family?

I got a few DMs about this in the AMA I did on Friday while flying to San Diego, so let me offer some perspective here on how to do an MBA when you are supporting a family.

There is no doubt in my mind that full time MBA programs are structured for younger people with few family obligations. The jobs that MBAs are hired into after school are also generally aimed at people who are single or do not have kids. The demanding work environments and expectations are more lined up for those without a whole lot of family obligations. For example, when I got a consulting offer, it was structured for someone who did not really have a family per se. Their was a signing bonus, but no moving stipend. Thats because most of the people who take consulting jobs do not have a family to think about. They barely have furniture lol.

That being said, there are a fair number of families in MBA programs. I did my MBA program with my wife and my 16-month-old daughter. During that time my daughter went to pre-school three days a week and my wife did not work full time. My wife and I did the following to make it work.