Question from Grandfather

My grandfather recently posed a question to me in an email. He wrote:

I would like to hear about the program for your Master's degree. My experience in grad school was that many of the professors felt that their course was the only one we took so they seemed to load us up on things to do outside class. This is not a problem for you? What do you experience?

(He also went on to say that of his more than two dozen grandchildren, I was, by far, his favorite. Furthermore, of his great-grandchildren, Mason and Mallory were at the top of that list, as well, but I left that part out as it is not relevant)

I would say that the faculty completely respects our time. As a distance learning program, 100 percent of the students in my cohort have full-time jobs (in addition to spouses, children, etc). They seem to understand the competing demands in our lives. Through the technology we use, the professors routinely poll us as to the best time to conduct virtual office hours or conduct live lectures.

So do they ‘load up’ on us? Only to the point where we learn the material. Many of the classes have group assignments so we can ‘divide and conquer’ and rely on each other’s skill sets to enhance our learning. For example, I just got off of a video conference call with my Econ C530 group and one of my team members is a financial analyst. He led the discussion on net present value and answered many of our questions. I believe the three of us would have struggled had it not been for the fourth’s subject matter expertise.

The professors themselves are available anytime through email (with a response time between two and 24 hours). My econ professor offered to meet with me in person (as I am local to Indianapolis) should I have trouble with some of the concepts (and by concepts I mean calculus … what a derivative of a function, you ask? Me, too).

So far, I have been completely satisfied with the workload in my first two classes.