Grad School Options

[Hotdogman1]

I graduated with a UMPI BABA (3.9 GPA) with around 50 Sophia credits and a bunch of other alternative credits.

Some of the “top” Universities I’ve been accepted at are:
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: (Online) MSM
Boston University: (Online) MBA
Purdue University: (Online) MS in Aviation and Aerospace Management
Georgia Institute of Technology: (Online) MS in Analytics

While these are very good schools, the programs themselves aren’t tough to get into as long as you meet all the requirements and doesn’t require GRE/GMAT. I decided to go to a local state university instead.

These are great programs, in fact I just recommended them to someone yesterday.  Major congrats on the acceptances!  Btw, did you choose the local university because it has a good reputation in your city?  Usually that’s more important if you don’t plan on moving out of state.

Reputation was something I considered, but was not a big factor in my decision-making at the time. I was looking for a program I could do while working full time, was non-CBE, and was cheap enough for my company’s tuition reimbursement benefit to fully cover over a 2-3 year period. The local state university I go to is in a similar ranking tier to the previously mentioned schools, in-person, and a 15-minute drive from my house. The standard graduate tuition is higher than my requirement, but I luckily did get a partial scholarship that would just barely cover the entire degree when including the tuition reimbursement.

However, I do think I should have considered reputation and alumni network more seriously. A family member just graduated from the same school with a 4.0 GPA. He went to 4 school job fairs, got 4 job offers/ 8 interviews / 21 phone interviews / 72 applications. He also has an English professor going over his cover letter and a VP of a medium sized company going over his resume. Obviously, I don't consider him to be the norm as he was very active in utilizing all available career resources, but I am very impressed with the amount of support the school provided and look forward to taking advantage of that support in the future.