Moving from a good job in Vancouver to study in the US with two small children is a challenge

DOING AN MBA was always at the back of my mind from my days as an electronic engineering undergraduate at NUI Galway.

The value of an MBA became clearer to me as I gained more experience in the working world. With my technical background, I found after a few years in the corporate world that I could reach a certain level of management, but in order to continue to progress upwards, I needed greater business and management expertise.

An MBA will also give me the opportunity to align my technical background with some of my personal values.

I have always been passionate about environmental causes, and the chance to get involved in the current wave of green/clean investment is a strong motivator to my decision to go back to school.

Driving home from a weekend away in the summer of 2006 my wife and I talked it over, and decided the time was right for me to apply to business schools.

We had discussed it many times, and we both recognised that if I didn't do it soon we would find it very hard to do it at all. We already had a three-year-old, and a new baby on the way, so uprooting ourselves would not be an easy matter, and would grow more difficult as our children - and we ourselves - got older.

Most business schools encourage prospective applicants to visit and sit in on classes, and this was very useful in terms of figuring out which schools would be a good fit.

In November 2006 we flew from Vancouver to the east coast of the US for a week, and visited Boston (Harvard), New York (Columbia) and Philadelphia (Wharton).

I dropped the plan to apply to Columbia after this visit - the business school was great, but we couldn't see ourselves living in Manhattan on a student budget. Another week in 2007 allowed us to visit Stanford and Berkeley on the west coast.

The application process itself is very similar for most schools in the US. They all require applicants to provide scores from a standardised test (usually the GMAT, though the GRE is accepted by some schools), along with transcripts from undergraduate and any graduate programmes.

Recommendations from supervisors, and in some cases peers, also form an important part of the application. Finally, candidates must provide schools with essays on assigned topics.

I spent a couple of months juggling work, family and preparation for the GMAT and sat the exam in May 2007. Supervisors and peers/colleagues at work were roped in to provide recommendations.

Schools released their essay topics over the summer of 2007, and I found that writing these essays was the most challenging and interesting part of the application process.

The topics varied somewhat from school to school, but there were also many similarities. Applicants need to be introspective in these essays, as they probe a wide range of topics ranging from your motivation for doing an MBA, through examples of your leadership skills, all the way to your longings and desires.

Some sample topics in 2007 included: "What is your career vision and why is this choice meaningful to you?" and "What matters most to you, and why?"

As the applications season drew to a close I had interviewed with Wharton, Harvard and Berkeley. Five days before Christmas in 2007 I got a call from the admissions office at Wharton, and was told I had been admitted - a great way to end the year.

For some strange reason I thought my life would get easier once I had been accepted to business school.

I figured I would be able to forget all about the stress of applying, and avoid the compulsion to check my e-mail, my applications and the various online MBA discussion forums every five minutes.

That has not really turned out to be the case, as the stress associated with applying has simply been replaced by the stress of being accepted and realising that now we really do have to uproot ourselves and move to Philadelphia.

So now we find ourselves preparing to leave the security of jobs, networks of friends and family and the great Vancouver west-coast lifestyle. As I write this I'm up to my ears in visas, packing boxes, moving companies, finding elementary schools and accommodation.

Wharton's mandatory MBA pre-term started this week, so earlier this month we packed our car and driven east to Philadelphia. Although I am a little apprehensive about going back to college, I am certainly looking forward to the next two years.

gkeane@wharton.upenn.edu

Gareth Keane is from Moycullen, Co Galway.

He graduated from NUI Galway with a degree in electronic engineering in 1994.

He then spent the next five years at Queens University Belfast as a postgraduate student and research assistant, graduating with a PhD in 1999. He has worked for PMC-Sierra in Vancouver, Canada, since 2000 and will be joining the MBA class of 2010 at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in the US.

He and his wife Mareese have two children, Alison (4) and David (1).