Guide to Online Education > Online Education In-Depth > Meet Real Online Students > Robin, MBA in IT Management
Name: Robin Bundy
Age: 40-ish
Marital Status: In a relationship
Quote: "Education is about giving you legitimacy in the world."
School: Capella University
Target: MBA in I.T. Management, in progress
Her typical day is separated into equal blocks. She spends four hours taking incoming calls and answering e-mails from software developers. The other four hours she spends in team meetings, interfacing with other tech support engineers, and researching questions for which there were no immediate resolutions.
It's a far cry from her work with the construction company. And so far from where she started out, that her first job must seem like a lifetime ago.
Robin used to work as a laborer in a sewage treatment plant. "Going into a factory is what people did," she explains. In 1986 it was called a 'good job.'"
She worked in what was affectionately known as "the poo-poo palace." "Doo-Dooville," another endearing name for the place where waste is separated from water by adding polymer to the big drums, was her workspace for over a decade.
Robin ran the presses that vacuumed the water out so that the dried sludge could be dropped onto a belt and incinerated or conveyed to a lagoon.
The smell made her sick. But then, everyone gets sick during the first two weeks, she explains.
It takes two weeks for the system to acclimate she recalls being told. Her work clothes were too contaminated to bring home; she stored everything in her assigned locker and went home hating her job every day. She knew it was time for a change.
"I knew I was wasting my potential," she says candidly.
"My partner knew it, too. She got tired of listening to me talk about it; and gave me the push (as in kick) I needed at what appears to have been the right time in my life."
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