Karen has been working in management at corporations for 16 years. She has two children, ages 8 and 10, who live with their father. She lived in the LA area for 15 years, but recently her company offered to fund her studies in a Master's program. After being accepted into the SIMS program, she relocated to Berkeley, where her mother also lives. Throughout her career, she has been very focused on marketing and business analysis, but has always wanted to become more involved in project management. Because she works for a technology firm, she would like to augment her knowledge of technical issues, as well as learn more about technology from a programmer or system designer’s point of view. She ultimately hopes to be able to gain a better understanding of the inner workings of the technology her teams use so that she can more accurately assess their capabilities. She is also interested in learning more about the social issues in technological fields that deal with managing information. She is interested in obtaining some technical skills that she can use right away, as well as skills that will guide her thinking for the future.

When Karen intitially decided to return to graduate school, she considered both the interdisciplinary MIMS degree and the MBA. Because she felt she was already knowledgeable about business and fairly advanced in her career, she decided that an MBA would not be as helpful as the MIMS degree in helping her reach her goals. MIMS would allow her to explore areas other than management, while still allowing her to take business-related classes and utilize the campus’ business school resources.

Because the opportunity cost of attending school at this point in her career is high, Karen would like to make the most of her time at SIMS and explore interests she had formerly put on the back burner. She hopes to take classes in other subjects which have always fascinated her, including emerging technologies such as biotechnology and genomics. Her company is paying her tuition, and she has taken out student loans to cover her living expenses. Because she is living with her mother a few miles from campus, she can also assist her mother with some health issues as well as keep her expenses to a minimum. She is only able to go to LA to visit her children once or twice a month, and does not have any friends in the area. She would like to get involved in academic and cultural activities on campus in order to meet others with interests similar to hers.