“Time to get my masters ;). Skip that bachelors”
That was my immediate reaction after Cornell wrote back about its Executive MBA Metro NY program. I forwarded the email to Amanda, then followed up with another message: “I am legit doing this. Sounds like they will take me :)”
I was excited. I was also getting a little ahead of myself.
Two weeks earlier I had sent in my resume for a pre-assessment. I did not have a bachelor's degree, and Cornell knew that. The point was to find out whether the work I had done since leaving school could make me competitive anyway.
This question was not new. Nine years earlier I had asked if work could count as college credit. By now there was a lot more work to count. I had gone from running systems at Beatport to leading technology at Shutterstock, then into product, teams, budgets, negotiations, customers, and the rest of what happens when a company grows.
Cornell reviewed the resume and encouraged me to apply. They said I could be a competitive candidate, which was an unusually big sentence for me to read given the missing degree.
They also told me what to make clearer in the application: management and leadership experience, budgeting, customer relationships, negotiations, and leading projects and teams. That list sounded a lot like my actual education.
The Executive MBA Metro NY program had moved to Cornell Tech earlier that year. Classes would begin the following summer. Admissions were rolling, so if I wanted to try, I needed to get moving.
This was not an acceptance. The admissions committee still had the final call after a formal application. Cornell had only said the application was worth making.
I was going to make it.