Minsk to Mist

One of my coworkers says that it’s always painful when your crown falls down. My big failure on the first attempt of studying an MBA online showed that this was an understatement.

When you have been a top student your entire life and are used to being at least among the top performers at work, a big failure at something that means a lot to you comes as a punch in the guts.

Failure.

Loser.

Not good enough.

Not cut out for it.

Eh, I’ve been hearing that my entire life for various reasons. Bad health. Bad passport. Mediocre looks. Wrong timing. ‘Just because you are a girl’.

One of the great things about being ADHD is that you don’t focus on anything for too long, including what people say trying to discourage you from pursuing your dreams. Focusing on your inner voice is a bit easier, but luckily, mine tends to be very encouraging and action-oriented.

What to expect when you get a mark you weren’t expecting

After pouting on my results for a bit, I started thinking what I should do about it. Not that this feedback was unfair, although the fact that the professor missed a portion of writing and, hence, the entire point of one of the assignment didn’t exactly give me a lot of confidence in the quality of the marking process. Anyway, the procedure for complaining was even more convoluted than the concept of academic writing, and even if I were to complain, it didn’t cancel the fact that I had a lot to learn from that feedback.

In Belarusian universities, once you submit your paper, you never see it again. EVER! You will get your mark and maybe a casual remark from your professor about how bad or good your writing was. (In all fairness, this is due to ridiculous rules that all papers have to be submitted as hard copies, and these copies have to be retained by the university).

In the UK, you submit your paper as a digital copy, and a few weeks later, you get it marked and commented. And those comments are your learning gold!

Hard as it was, I faced the music and carefully read through each comment from my tutor. Even those that sounded a bit too emotional for an academic paper:) I accepted the fact that these had nothing to do with my personality or my brightness, and these were the things I had to translate into a list of action items.

The result of that exercise was a list of ‘lessons learned’ that I now revisit before sitting down and working on any new assignment. And a checklist for an assignment prep – which I follow religiously!

What happened next?

A word of advice – most Eastern Europeans are not great at sharing their experiences of handling a catastrophe. We are BRILLIANT at handling them, but we then dismiss all our hard work, resilience and grind as ‘er, you know, I just handled it, counted my losses and moved on’. Fantastic crisis managers, terrible trainers on how to handle a mishap.

My module had one more tutor-marked assignment (TMA) coming up before we would get to the end of module. I would have to score at about 85% or higher at the TMA to ever be able to pass that module. Having spoken to the student support team, I decided to go ahead with that assignment anyway just to check if my lessons learned were going in the right direction and whether I was making progress.

My second score was 65%, which meant I wouldn’t pass the module, however, it indicated that at least I did the right thing this time around and my assignment got substantially better.

With that knowledge, I deferred my studies, took a break and restarted the same module a few months later. As of today, my two assignments stand at 67% and 75% respectively, with the end-of-module assignment mark to be announced in about a month.

Why community matters

The main problem with studying an MBA course online is the lack of day-to-day contact with your peers. Hypothetically, you can set up WhatsApp groups and chat to each other any time you want, however, I am yet to see if anyone does it anyway and whether the vibes of such chats actually help. From my experience, a contact that only exists as a chat exchange does not qualify as a relationship – or a genuine contact, for that matter.

This is why the practice of a residential school made all the difference. Towards the end of the module, we had three options for partaking in the residential school – a face-to-face one over the long weekend, a short online one for a couple of days or a long online one for about 12 days. I opted for the latter as I had a scheduling conflict with the first one, and allocating small chunks of time for almost 2 weeks was easier than taking 2 full days off.

Within the residential school, I had a pleasure – and an honour – to work with my peers on a few assignments, create a poster and a presentation to address a real business problem for a real-life organisation, and most importantly, to hear that my peers were struggling just as much as I am, if not more.

Full-time jobs AND looking after their kids.

Not fully understanding what some assignments required.

Doubting if they could deliver up to the expectations that were not exactly clear.

Falling outside of the allocated time brackets and spending way more time on the assignments than it was designed.

Being neurodivergent while managing all of the above.

When you know that you are not the only one struggling, it somehow becomes easier. You understand that other people are going through at least the same issues. You can learn from others and explore new coping mechanisms. It suddenly becomes almost a crime to sit and whine when some people have even more on their plates than you are, and your self-pity party is over.

Another reason the residential school experience was amazing is the time efficiency. When all of you study on your own time, which is super-limited, and you have the ‘can-do’ attitude, you suddenly become ueber-effective with how you manage your time. Asynchronous work on an assignment functions perfectly, people proactively make enhancements that actually make sense and make the group project look way cooler than it was originally expected, and meetings genuinely help in syncing up on the next steps and fit in perfectly in half an hour.

The only problem with that is then going back to work where such efficiency is still a dream…

(To be continued…)