Hello

This is a blog about the three main aspects of my life right now: being a mommy, working full-time, and pursuing an MBA at the same time. It's not easy, but it's what I do, and it's not rocket science (which is part of what I do at work). Hopefully you'll get a little bit of everything out of this.

I became a mom in May 2008. I thought I would morph into the perfect, quintessential mom the moment I gave birth. That's not exactly what happened. What really happened is that eventually, my daughter taught me what is important in life, which turned out to be something different than what I thought it was. That process is still ongoing.

As far as work goes, I can best describe myself as someone who has career ADD. I have a BS and an MS in Mechanical Engineering. As far as I knew at graduation, this would mark the end of the learning process and the beginning of 30 or 40 years of running around in a lab coat and solving the world's problems. How funny that seems to me now! I always imagined myself as a working mom. However, the picture a DINK (dual-income no kids) husband or wife has of a working mom in their head does not quite capture the reality. It has its really wonderful moments and its not-so-great ones.

On top of all this and struggling with a post-partum mood disorder, (I will get to that at some point), I decided what I really needed was a Masters in Business Administration. Seriously. You can stop the chortling now. At the time, I was a bit bored with my current job (see ADD reference above), my husband was in his last semester of business school, and it looked like something interesting that had relatively little to do with what I was working on then, but enough to get someone to pay for it. Three cheers for working for a big corporation! I'm about to start my third semester. I've learned what works and some things that my family would definitely prefer I not take on. At the end of the first semester, I think I found the real reason I enrolled in business school. I want to make a difference in the world for the better, for my daughter and for everyone in a tangible way. I have always fantasized about working for a non-profit company, but I think I've found a way to help the world through business. That sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Save the planet! Save the people! Save the bottom line! Are these things really symbiotic? We shall see . . .