MBA

November 14, 2024 By radefolaju Leave a Comment

Should I get my master’s degree…? 6 Reasons we don’t take the leap

Have you considered going back to school for your master’s? Certainly, it can be a daunting prospect, but the truth is that most of the things that hold us back from the adventure of a graduate degree aren’t quite the deal-breakers we imagine…

In case you’re wondering whether or not to take the next step, here are the top six reasons we don’t pursue the higher education that could change our lives and careers.

We think…

It’s too expensive. By now we’re used to hearing about prohibitively expensive education and overwhelming burdens of student debt. However, not every program comes with this kind of cost. Belmont Abbey’s School of Graduate and Professional Studies conscientiously maintains affordable rates and meaningful financial aid options in order to ensure that its master’s programs remain accessible to young professionals.
I don’t have time. We all lead busy lives, so it can be difficult to see where a degree program might fit on a daily basis. Certainly, graduate studies require a time commitment, but Belmont Abbey master’s students find that the program’s flexible online structure not only presents manageable requirements but also strengthens the skills and strategies that bring new levels of fruitfulness to your time outside of coursework.
I won’t be able to balance my full-time job. While career and classes both require time and attention, Belmont Abbey’s flexible online graduate programs are designed for the full-time professional. The nature of a master’s degree, moreover, recognizes professional goals and networks as essential elements of the program. In fact, remaining actively engaged in a career throughout your graduate studies can actually help enrich and contextualize coursework by uniting it with consistent, hands-on experience. Ultimately, the Abbey’s graduate degrees aim to enhance career success and take you to the next level without demanding that you put your job or life on hold.
I won’t be able to balance my home life. Because we love our families and honor our responsibilities to them, we should evaluate the demands that our prospective studies might make on life at home. We know that creating personal and family balance during our graduate studies will present challenges like any meaningful commitment. And yet, graduates of Belmont Abbey’s master’s programs demonstrate time and again that the flexible nature of the online coursework and the responsive accessibility of professors help encourage and sustain successful balance. It’s also important to remember that your loved ones want to see you succeed and that your family, as they accompany you on this educational journey, can be a true source of strength.
It’s too late at this point. Whether you’re fresh out of college or bringing years of career experience to the decision, it’s never too late to pursue the personal excellence and increased expertise of a graduate degree. The benefits to your personal and professional development remain profoundly relevant at any stage of your career.
It’s just not worth it. There are many reasons why this last is a tempting but ultimately unsatisfactory conclusion. A graduate degree is not everyone’s calling, but if it’s yours, the benefits to your earning power, advancement, career satisfaction, personal development, and community relationships remain profound and substantial. In fact, to explore 10 reasons to complete your graduate degree, click here.

Although none of the above should prevent you from pursuing the transformative education to which you are called, going back to school will always present challenges and require the discipline of sacrifice. Just remember that education is an investment in the future – your own and your community’s – and when we respond to a genuine calling with generosity and love, the blessings are always greater than we can anticipate.

When you’re ready to take the next step, Belmont Abbey College is here to help. Explore our flexible, affordable online graduate degree programs and discover how a master’s could change your life and your career! Click here to check out our MBA, MSN, MS in Data Analytics, or MA programs in Classical and Liberal Education, Communication, or Leadership.

November 13, 2024 By radefolaju Leave a Comment

Is a Master’s Worth it?

Wondering why you should get a master’s degree? Explore these 10 reasons to take your education to the next level.

Getting your master’s can be a daunting prospect, especially for busy professionals seeking to maintain balance amid work, family, and personal commitments. It’s worth pausing to consider, however, what a graduate degree could mean for you – especially since assessing the benefits can help shed light on what you want from your career and your life as a whole.

So… if you are a working professional, what ARE the benefits of earning a master’s?

Ultimately, a master of arts or sciences empowers you to:

Further discern your calling by engaging meaningfully with an area of personal or professional interest. A degree program can clarify unexplored possibilities for growth within your chosen field, highlighting the industry needs and opportunities that invite your unique contribution . Graduate programs offer more opportunities to engage your field at the cutting edge as professors provide context and guide you in making original contributions to the academic and professional conversation. Even more than an undergraduate degree, graduate studies position you to recognize and embrace the possibilities of your field or discipline.
Increase your earning power. Full-time, 25-34 year old professionals with a master’s degree earn a 20% higher median salary than those whose highest level of education remains at the undergraduate level, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Completing your master’s qualifies you to climb the salary scale with greater confidence.
Learn from – and join – experts in your chosen field. Graduate professors combine education, training, and experience in a way that uniquely qualifies them to provide the formative guidance you need to excel both personally and professionally. They have dedicated their exceptional knowledge and skills to helping you achieve success, ultimately facilitating your growth toward new levels of collaboration in your discipline or field.
Alongside a verified standard of knowledge, skill, and critical thought, a master’s degree demonstrates your disciplined commitment to a field. A master’s signals not only that you are prepared for enhanced responsibilities and greater opportunities, but also that you are willing to embrace challenges, learn new skills, and develop your potential. Colleagues and supervisors recognize this, and the recognition transforms your professional landscape.
Expand your professional network through the connections and opportunities available within a college community. Even beyond hands-on learning, research, thesis development, and conferences, the institutional life of a college includes a community of alumni, professors, and peers who can provide support and invaluable connection. In terms of resources for higher education and advancement, graduate degree programs remain particularly attuned to the active professional life since by its nature it seeks to prepare serious and aspiring participants for meaningful work in their chosen fields.
Raise your promotion potential. Don’t let your education level keep you from career advancement, especially in an industry where education thresholds might otherwise curb your upward mobility or hold you back from the leadership only you can offer. A master’s degree demonstrates expertise that qualifies you to rise more quickly and confidently than you otherwise might have.
Learn together with other motivated seekers. Aside from the professional advantages of earning your master’s – which includes a network of peers aspiring to more profound collaboration in their fields – the personal benefits of a learning community shouldn’t be underestimated. Engaging in the shared pursuit of excellence and exploring the depths and challenges of a chosen field offer a basis for lasting friendships and community, especially at the graduate level, where conversations seek and support original contributions at the very forefront of a discipline or industry.
Open up new career opportunities. As you grow and develop both personally and professionally within a master’s program, the career opportunities open to you grow commensurately, providing new challenges and satisfactions that can increase your sense of accomplishment and overall well-being. A master’s degree embraces a wide new range of careers and levels of advancement that might otherwise remain out of reach.
Embrace your God-given potential. When you develop your capacities and gifts to their full potential, you participate in God’s creative work and embrace His will. Of course, formal education isn’t the only way to do this, but it can be a powerful means of responding to the vision of our Creator and taking on the vocation that is our particular calling in life. With the expertise of a master’s degree, you invite new possibilities of creative and active participation in God’s plan for your life.
Transform your community. Remember that embracing your calling benefits not just you but also your entire community. Your gifts transform the world and change the lives of those around you, so developing them through a graduate degree program has truly unimaginable effects. Find out what it can mean for you!

Consider investing in yourself, your career, and your community. Take the next step today by exploring Belmont Abbey’s flexible, affordable online graduate degree programs, whether our MBA, MSN, MS in Data Analytics, or MA programs in Classical and Liberal Education, Communication, or Leadership. Click here to learn more.

November 7, 2024 By radefolaju Leave a Comment

The Definition of Servant Leadership

“It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.” Usually we think of this as an unarguable dictum of the business world, stressing only the necessity of developing a professional network to advance in a chosen field. But Dr. Brad Frazier relays this to his Belmont Abbey College MBA students on their first day of Christian Ethics & Leadership for the Common Good, the message runs strikingly deeper, resonating with the kind of authentic, servant leadership that is more than a business strategy. It is a calling. It’s who you know.

In the words of Catherine Barber ‘15, Adult Degree Program alumna and pioneering graduate of the Abbey’s MBA, Belmont Abbey cultivates “a holistic approach toward corporate leadership. They focus on the fundamentals of what makes a great leader and the importance of their influence on a community or organization… While learning the ins and outs of business management can make you knowledgeable, the most significant impact is how you influence others with your knowledge. The most outstanding leaders can lead by the Golden Rule while valuing the feedback from those they lead. It’s about establishing trust and influence.”

An education in business goes beyond the knowledge you acquire through instruction and experience – though this is certainly important. It goes beyond the skills you learn and practice – including analysis, communication, creative problem-solving, and networking. And “who you know” is not simply about using influence to climb. Grounded in the Benedictine tradition of education, which orders the mind and the heart to the Good, Belmont Abbey’s MBA understands “who you know” as a call to true, faithful, and ethical leadership within a community. In fact, to servant leadership. The authentic leader builds trust and influence in service to something more – embracing not just “what” or “how” but also, and more meaningfully, “who” and “why.”

“This program,” Catherine states, “made me a better leader. Understanding the fundamentals of leadership with an enhanced ethical approach made me confident in understanding why servant-style leadership benefits the greater good and how Benedictine values reiterate the importance of understanding emotional intelligence. It made me realize how effective leadership is a two-way street built on communication and trust.” It depends on a recognition of personhood from both sides, a recognition that allows us to seek the Good with honesty, humility, and hope.

The Belmont Abbey MBA – while it certainly prepares students to excel professionally – embraces and cultivates leadership rooted in the personal, living dignity of communities. And for Catherine Barber, as a business professional, a wife and mother, and a member of a faith community, this holistic approach to corporate leadership created a meaningful synthesis between the demands of the business world and the essential, Benedictine values that embrace excellence and virtue in all things.

For Abbey MBA graduates like Catherine, and for all those they influence and encounter, these Benedictine hallmarks speak to the definition of servant leadership because they place community, stability, and stewardship at the heart of this calling. In keeping with love and hospitality, they seek to build up thriving communities where all are free to realize their authentic and God-given potential.

It’s not what you know. It’s who you know. Because the person before us and the community behind us give leadership its meaning and its purpose.

Consider what a Belmont Abbey MBA could mean for your future. Click here to learn more and embrace your calling today!

October 30, 2024 By Sarah Bolton Leave a Comment

Faith-Fueled Journey: The Inspiring Story of MBA Alum Catherine Barber

In a sense, Catherine Rivera Barber began her Abbey journey long before she set foot on campus… because even before she’d ever heard of the Abbey, Catherine was learning what it meant to be a servant leader, a call that would find its catalyst years later in her formation as an MBA student at Belmont Abbey College.

The youngest of three, Catherine was born in New York but raised in North Carolina, where her parents moved the family while she was still very young. Both of her parents had come to New York from different parts of Latin America early in life, and having experienced the suffering and insecurity of a lack of parental influence themselves, they’d determined to raise their own children in loving security no matter the cost. Concerned with the condition of schools and neighborhoods in New York, then, Catherine’s father accepted a job in North Carolina and moved the family there. Soon after settling, however, he lost his job.

In the challenges and uncertainties that followed, Catherine grew up watching her parents continually give of themselves to nurture and support their children. And through this time of hardship and sacrifice, she saw them rediscover their faith.

As her mother began bringing the family to church each Sunday, Catherine became aware of another dimension of her parents’ love and care. Ever since, whenever she or one of her siblings struggle, they find steadfast support in their mother’s prayer, her affirming words, and scriptural encouragement. Her favorite Bible verse, Philippians 4:13, has even become a pillar of Catherine’s own spiritual life: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

So, years later, having graduated high school, earned two associate’s degrees, married, and had her first child, the Catherine who joined her husband on a whim in the Registrar’s Office of Belmont Abbey College was someone who brought with her the foundations of an education in true leadership – a foundation from which she could recognize what Belmont Abbey had to offer to her own vocational journey.

In two short years, Catherine had had her second child and completed her bachelor’s as a Business Management student in the Abbey’s Adult Degree Program, graduating in 2015. Completing her degree while shouldering the responsibilities of a young wife and mother – and increasingly mindful of all that she wanted to give and to teach her own children – Catherine was deeply grateful for the unwavering encouragement and the “life-changing” formation she received from her professors. “The adult degree program helped me and my husband balance the needs of work, school, and life,” she remembers, and at graduation they “walked the stage together.” So when Catherine discovered that Belmont Abbey now offered graduate degrees, she eagerly considered what an Abbey MBA could mean for her personal and professional growth.

Catherine was well aware that the businesswoman she hoped to become would stand as a contradiction to many popular conceptions of the industry, conceptions not without their basis in experience. While determined to apply herself, embrace challenges, and excel, she wanted these efforts to build something more meaningful – and more flourishing – than the culture of burnout and personal aggrandizement that loses the root of human good within the rush for success. Catherine considered her family and her vocation in all its complexity. She thought of her parents and of the kind of mother and woman she wanted to be. And she hoped that returning to the Abbey would not only equip her with the knowledge and resources she needed for professional success but also challenge and form her to exercise her capacity for true leadership, stewardship, and meaningful community.

The program did not disappoint. Having completed the one-year MBA in 2024, Catherine reflects that her Belmont Abbey studies cultivated “a holistic approach toward corporate leadership,” not only addressing the critical “ins and outs of business management” but also emphasizing the importance of true, servant leadership and cultivating the qualities that embrace its full and essential meaning, so richly infused with the Benedictine hallmarks.

Catherine completed her MBA while working full-time and continuing to embrace marriage and motherhood. Between the flexibility of online classes and the support of responsive, expert instructors, she found the Abbey’s MBA an ideal fit, in practice as well as formative vision.

“I had a fantastic experience with the faculty of Belmont Abbey College. They were always so encouraging and highly knowledgeable. Every course brought its challenges, which tested your understanding and made you dig a little deeper into every aspect of teaching. After every difficult assignment, I had an ‘AHA’ moment of reflection.” Building expertise in business communication, in data visualization, and in the technologies, theories, and culture that govern their effective practice, Catherine found in each class a new invitation to develop her skills and understanding in service to her calling as an ethical leader.

“Belmont Abbey’s MBA program was influential from the first semester,” Catherine said. Throughout her studies, but especially in her course on Christian Ethics and Effective Leadership for the Common Good, Catherine found new insights on her journey and its relation to different views of leadership, different Benedictine values, and the varied emphases of different cultures and communities. The need to understand, to listen with humility, and to make oneself present to others – uniting self-awareness and empathy with the capacity to recognize others’ strengths and weaknesses – all of this shed new light on Catherine’s deep desire to lead and to influence others for the good. “It gave me the confidence to speak to what I want out of my career,” she noted: not only the skills and knowledge but also the impact and the joy of meaningful community. “It (also) gave me… the ability to highlight my achievements,” she added, “At the start of the program, I was promoted to an Assistant Vice President position within one of the largest financial institutions in the US.”

Even during times of stress, when Catherine struggled to balance the demands of full-time graduate study with her family and career responsibilities, she drew strength from the faith her parents continued to inspire. At one point early in the spring semester, Catherine got sick and fell behind in her Corporate Governance for Law course. Uncertain whether she could recover her footing, she felt herself beginning to flounder. But when Dr. Ann Marie Hayes, who habitually sent Bible verses to the class as centering reminders, reached out with the familiar Philippians 4:13, Catherine heard her mother’s voice in her head and knew, truly, that she could do all things through Christ. “The power of prayer is very real,” Catherine maintains, as is the recognition of caring and inspired leadership. Men and women like her parents and her Abbey professors, who embrace servant leadership in the daily exercise of their vocations, have a profound and lasting impact in others’ lives. Catherine excelled in Dr. Hayes’ course and completed the Abbey’s MBA program in the joyful confidence that her own leadership journey would have the power to inspire and develop others, in turn, by the grace of God.

Today, as Assistant Vice President of the Charlotte Market in Global Financial Crimes – Special Investigations, Catherine has established a “mentorship opportunity within the company,” challenging herself to explore risk management and efficient data handling. She has now passed her CAMS (Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist) certification as well. With each new opportunity for growth, expertise, and credentials, Catherine recognizes a renewed call to apply her gifts, capacities, and knowledge in authentic servant leadership.

Belmont Abbey’s MBA “made me a better leader,” Catherine asserts. “Understanding the fundamentals of leadership with an enhanced ethical approach made me confident in why servant-style leadership benefits the greater good and how Benedictine values reiterate the importance of emotional intelligence. It made me realize how effective leadership is a two-way street built on communication and trust.”

Since graduation, Catherine has found her peers and supervisors placing more faith in her, more trust. She welcomes the networking opportunities and the challenge in complex cases, seeing in each new encounter the chance to have an impact. “Everything in my life ties together,” she says, and as it does, she recognizes the increasing desire to draw closer to God and to continue her spiritual journey. “Strong leaders are rooted in faith,” she states, bringing forth from this Benedictine stability the capacity to “wholeheartedly help others.” Now, looking to the future and eager to show her daughter and her sons that they, too, can do and be, she is “excited for the new journey.”

April 29, 2024 By Sarah Bolton Leave a Comment

Belmont Abbey College Announces Spirit of St. Benedict Award Winner: Dr. Brad Frazier

Dr. Bradford Frazier, Director of Belmont Abbey’s MBA and Master of Leadership programs, has been named this year’s Spirit of St. Benedict Award winner. Abbot Solari Placid, O.S.B., and President Thierfelder announced this wonderful honor at the annual Employee Recognition Luncheon on April 29th, 2024.

Belmont Abbey’s most prestigious recognition, the Spirit of St. Benedict Award, embodies the spirit of the Benedictine community. It is presented to someone who makes a substantial contribution to the College, demonstrates hospitality as evidenced by concern for others in the College Community, and gives service without regard for recognition, among other criteria.

Brad continues to exemplify the Benedictine hallmarks and carries out Belmont Abbey’s mission “so that in all things, God may be glorified.” Congratulations, Brad, on this exciting and well-deserved award!