Kelley Direct: 505 Miles

I'm Britton Ellis, and I'm in my first year in the Kelley Direct MBA program. I grew up and currently live in Richmond, VA. I work as a regulatory accountant (public utilities) for the State Corporation Commission. I previously worked for the federal government. I have an undergraduate degree in Computer Science, and a master's degree in Accounting. I am concurrently working on my CPA and CMA certification, which hopefully will be finished in early 2010.

I chose the Kelley Direct MBA program because not only does it give me the flexibility to attend class while working full-time, but also it is from a top 15 business school and is taught by outstanding faculty.

I'm hoping this blog will serve as a way to document my experience in the Kelley program, and will hopefully be able to give a students perspective of the program. If there are any prospective student's, or current students, who wish to talk about the program, I am always more than willing to talk.

On "winter break" from my one class this semester, C521 - Managing Accounting Information for Decision Making with Prof. Eric Johnson.  This gives me a chance to catch my breath, as I feel with work, school, and family (and oh yeah, studying for the CPA), I've been going full throttle for the past few months.

I'm well into my third Kelley Direct class, and thus far everything is going great. Fall semester, Quantitative Analysis (C520) was an amazing class. Profs. Venkat, Cutshall, and Soni did a great job, and exceeded my expectations going into the class. In fact, going into it I thought "hey, I'm an excel expert and if I have one strength, it's my analytical ability, so this class should be a breeze". I was dead wrong, not only did I find myself rethinking how I view excel, I even found the class more challenging that some math and stats classes I had while in engineering school. I did well in the class in the end, and consider myself changed in the way I view excel and the way I think about certain problems.

I'm going to use this break from class to try to get caught up on work, get a good head start on studying for the next part of the CPA (2 of 4 done), and try to get ahead on C521 readings.

It's a Tuesday morning in early November, the day before Veterans Day in the US, about 10am in the morning, I'm in Richmond, VA, and I'm attending class for an MBA program that is in the Top 15.

Now while Richmond, VA certainly has some fine schools, Virginia Commonwealth University (my undergraduate Alma Mater) and University of Richmond, they are not top 15 MBA programs, at least according to the latest Business Week rankings. Just a decade or so ago, if I wanted to attend a top MBA program, living full-time in Richmond, VA would have been physically impossible. I would have had to quit work, uproot my family, and leave the city I love, to move somewhere else for a few years of my life. Quite honestly, I don't know if it would have happened.

Fast forward to 2009, and the concept of online education has taken off, most notably by the "for profit" schools that we always see advertising on TV (which please do not confuse with prestigious schools that are venturing into online education. And while a lot of lower tier business schools have started rolling out an online curriculum, the top 15 to 20 or so MBA programs have been very slow, except the Kelley school at Indiana. Last year about this time I started looking at options for an MBA, trying to find a program that would allow me to work full-time, stay in Richmond, and at the same time feel that I was getting the best education I could. There were some local choices (UR, VCU, and even Virginia Tech who does a remote site MBA here in Richmond), and some online choices (Penn State, Arizona State, Indiana). However, no matter how I analyzed the programs (reputation, price, flexibility), Indiana was my top choice (and I'm a very analytical person). I applied to Indiana first, with all others as possible seconds. I was accepted, and began the program in August of 2009.

Now, at this point I am only a few months into the program, and I can honestly say that there has been no regrets. In fact, I have been blown away by the quality of the program. I have spent literally the past decade in college (working full-time while getting my undergraduate, and a masters in accounting also), so I have taken my fair share of college courses, and the 2 classes I have taken so far in the Kelley Direct program, even though I am attending class from 505 miles away, easily rank in the top 5 of all classes I've taken.

I admit, I was skeptical at first of exactly how the "online thing" would work. But it works incredibly well, and without a lot of the noise and distractions of a typical classroom.

Hopefully this blog, and the other Kelley Direct student blogs, will help to distinguish the Kelley Direct program from others. I will continue to write of my experiences in the program in hopes that it will help future students determine if the KD program is the right choice for them.