Ready to start a new career or take your career to the next level? Professional Certificates on Coursera help you gain marketable skills and become job-ready for an in-demand career in less than 12 months.
Why are Professional Certificates on Coursera unique?
Learn from top companies and universities, including Google, IBM, UCI, SAS, and more with affordable programs starting at $39 USD per month
Get started right away and learn at your own pace, whenever and wherever it’s most convenient for you
Apply your new skills to hands-on projects that you can share in interviews to demonstrate your job-readiness to employers
Earn a career credential and unlock career support resources, including resume development help, interview preparation, and more.
Start your next career move by finding the right Professional Certificate for you!
Cloud Architecture with GCP Professional Certificate
Arizona State University TESOL Professional Certificate
IBM Customer Engagement Specialist Professional Certificate
SAS Programmer Professional Certificate
Data Engineering with GCP Professional Certificate
IBM z/OS Mainframe Practitioner Professional Certificate
IBM Applied AI Professional Certificate
Cloud Engineering with GCP Professional Certificate
IBM AI Engineering Professional Certificate
Hear from Professional Certificate learners:
Tristen went from working as a business account manager to a technology analyst after he completed the Google IT Support Professional Certificate program. He was able to demonstrate to the hiring manager that he had the knowledge and skills to provide IT support to the organization.
Sarah was able to land an internship at IBM after taking the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate. She learned valuable skills in her industry, got hands-on experience, and was able to talk about the projects she worked on in her interviews.
Sarah is a senior at Louisiana State University who knew she wanted to find her way from food service into a data science career. In her words, she shares how she gained hands-on experience that fast-tracked her path into data science in less than 6 months.
When I started the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate, I was a manager in food service. I knew I wanted to break into analytics and felt like courses on Coursera were the perfect way to start. After completing IBM Data Science Professional Certificate program in less than a month, I’m thrilled to say that I’ve gotten many internship interviews which led to some incredible opportunities. In fact, I recently completed an internship in analytics at a non-profit, and am currently working as a data science intern at an industrial sales company. The IBM Data Science Professional Certificate helped fast track my technical skills and professional development, allowing me to completely transition into analytics.
“Coming full circle, I interned as a data specialist at IBM this past summer!“
A lot of the course content was new to me. I had taken courses in statistics and SQL in my undergraduate program, but not in Python or any core data science concepts. The Professional Certificate taught me a lot of valuable skills in my industry, gave me hands-on experience, and not only helped me get interviews but also gave me projects to discuss in those interviews. I was introduced to Python, which I now use daily in my work. I’ve also been able to build off of what I’ve learned along with the problem-solving approach that IBM introduced.
In my current role, I love that I’m able to build information tools that help others in their jobs. The impact of my work is immediately visible, and allows me to support others in their work process. I learned a lot at IBM, both about myself and the industry. I was also able to focus on my programming and machine learning skills, as well as develop deep learning skills over the summer, which was a cool extension of what I did in the Professional Certificate.
Completing the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate over winter break really set me apart, and boosted my career. I tell all of my undergrad peers to take a Professional Certificate or Specialization on Coursera to get a leg up in the internship market. Spending my winter break completing this program was the best possible thing I could have done for my career.
Some words of advice:
I would advise students to make small, easy to achieve goals. Data Science can feel infinitely vast and intimidating to a beginner (even I feel overwhelmed when approaching new tools or concepts), but the key is to break the task or goal into bite-sized steps. The only way to run a marathon is one step at a time, learning Data Science can feel like a marathon, but if you take it step by step, you’ll get there just fine.
Sarah hopes to be a data scientist that works with customer behavioral data after she graduates. Understanding why people make decisions, and more importantly having the data to explain their behaviors, is fascinating to her and she hopes to work in a customer analytics, UX, marketing tech, or a law enforcement team. She’s also interested in applying to the University ofMichigan’s Masters of Applied Data Science program, which has exciting courses on behavior and social network analysis.
Mirela was a digital producer for the SEO department at a Romanian startup when she discovered the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate. After completing the program in less than 6 months, Mirela secured a new job in a new city that combines her passion for both data science and SEO.
B.C. Before Coursera
I have a background in numbers. My Bachelor’s degree is in Cybernetics, Statistics and Computer science for business, which I earned 20 years ago. I worked in banking and management with a lot of financial data but with more traditional tools like Excel. Back then, we hadn’t heard of data science.
I originally came to Coursera to study SEO and social psychology, but then I started hearing more about data science and its connections with those two topics of interest. I knew I wanted to learn more so I enrolled in the IBM Data Science Professional Certificate. At this point, I had no prior data science experience so the course content was largely new to me.
The IBM Data Science Professional Certificate reignited my passion for analytics – it was the kickstart I needed in order to make the change I wanted. I learned how to use Python for Power BI which was especially helpful for clustering customers. After finishing my IBM certificate, I was able to transition from the SEO department at the startup I work at into a more data-driven role in the R&D Analytics department.
New City, New Job – Onto the Next Adventure!
The good news doesn’t stop there. Not long after I completed the program, I applied for a new job that combines SEO and data science. The recruiters saw my LinkedIn profile where I posted my Professional Certificate and, during the interview, they told me they were impressed with my desire to learn new things and continuous self-improvement. After some back and forth, they told me I got the job!
“This experience has shown me that I don’t need to feel stuck in an old profession or afraid to develop new skills to launch a new career. Now I’m preparing to move to Barcelona to start a new life with a job that excites me!“
It’s always been a dream of mine to live in Barcelona, and now it’s becoming a reality. I’m incredibly grateful that Coursera and IBM helped me discover the relationship between SEO and data science so that I was able to pave a new path for myself. It’s never too late to launch a new career!
When the temperature dipped below 40, iguanas started falling from the trees. Small, sleek green iguanas; big iguanas as long as four feet from snout to tail, scales cresting gloriously from their heads; orange-and-green iguanas, their muscled, goose-pimpled arms resolving into sharp claws. Iguanas were everywhere: in the bushy areas surrounding canals, on sidewalks, in backyards, lying helpless among the fallen, rotting fruit of mango and orange trees.
Focus first just on this opening paragraph. Read it slowly and closely, almost as you would a poem, annotating or making a list of what you notice. When you’re finished, answer these questions:
What did you notice about the language? What words are surprising? What word or punctuation patterns did you notice, and how do they affect the description over all?
What words create an especially strong image? What do they make you picture?
The writer, Anne Doten, could have stopped after the first sentence and taken out all the description that follows. With only 800 words to work with, why do you think she kept it all in?
Where do you think the essay will go from here? Why might all this “showing” be important?
Now read the full essay, noting, especially, what words, phrases or lines are richest in terms of showing rather than telling.
Now Try This: Use the First Paragraph as a Template
Use thefirst paragraph of “The Iguana in the Bathtub” as a template for your own writing. You might use the piece you began in the “Before You Read” exercise, or come up with a new one.
Begin with a sentence that sets the scene, perhaps borrowing the “When this happened, that happened” structure this writer uses: “When the temperature dipped below 40, iguanas started falling from the trees.” For instance, “When the coach blew the whistle, the linebacker came straight at me” or “When my mother slammed the door, my sister screamed.”
Then, write two sentences that describe what a person observing the scene would see. To do this, you can directly mimic the structure of the second sentence in “The Iguana” by using the same pattern of adjectives and nouns (“Small, sleek green iguanas; big iguanas as long as four feet from snout to tail, scales cresting gloriously from their heads; orange-and-green iguanas, their muscled, goose-pimpled arms resolving into sharp claws”), or you can do it your own way.
Your goal: to make a reader see — or hear, taste, feel or smell — what is most important and memorable about this scene.
More Mentor Texts for Using Details to Show Rather Than Tell
Somehow, his family ends up with 24 Pepsi-Colas in their refrigerator. The story of what happens next is Mr. Fishman’s short, powerful story:
Around this time I learned that American supermarkets gave back 5 cents for every returned empty. (Some states, like Michigan, its very name like a granite monument, gave you 10 cents.) I decided I would return those cans and give the money to my parents. My secret — a surprise.
Read the essay, focusing on how Mr. Fishman anchors the whole story in this one goal he had at age 10 — to return the Pepsi cans and get money for them.
As you read, you might trace the structure of the story. What does each paragraph do? What does each add to the telling of this small story?
Then, consider these questions:
How do the first two paragraphs set the stage for the story and give some necessary background?
How does telling this story allow the writer to show readers a particular time and place through the eyes of a new immigrant?
How does he pull you into the action, minute by minute, in the three paragraphs that begin “On Saturday afternoon …”?
How is money a theme throughout, in both stated and implied ways? What other ideas recur?
What is the role of the last paragraph?
Now Try This: Find Your Own Short, Powerful Stories
Look back at the writing you did before reading the mentor text. What is strongest about it? Could it become a short essay like the one you just read? If so, what would you need to do to shape it?
What other small stories — or “evocative, particular moments” — from your life might make wonderful short essays?
In a 2010 lesson plan, “Going Beyond Cliché: How to Write a Great College Essay,” we suggest students first make a timeline of their lives, or of one period in their lives, brainstorming at least 20 events, big and small, that were significant to them for any reason.
You might try that, or you can brainstorm answers to this list of prompts — or both:
-A time I took a risk: -A time I learned something about myself: -A memory from childhood I think about often: -Something that happened to me that still makes me laugh: -Something very few people know about me: -Something I regret: -A time when I felt rejected: -Something I am really proud of: -Something that changed the way I think or look at the world: -How I am different from most people I know: -Some of my fears: -A time I felt truly satisfied: -A time I failed at something: -An object I own that tells a lot about me:
Once you’ve chosen a topic, you might try to free-write for 10 minutes or so, asking yourself as you go: What was most interesting or memorable about this? What images come to mind when you think about this topic? Do you picture a person, a scene, a place? Do you hear a conversation or a bit of music? Do you smell, taste or feel something?
As the ride comes to an end, so does the essay. The narrator explains what he now understands, having finally done the thing he dreaded for so long:
A sense of joy overtook me, that we could all be scared out of our wits together. Maybe we were always frightened of what was coming, had been forever, but only now could express it in shrieks and tears. Fear was like a connective tissue even if our real connective tissue was sustaining whiplash. After all, that’s what the Beast offered: not death but four minutes of life strapped in and beyond the tether of its own control. The train threaded into the station. We climbed out, laughing dizzily, and I felt something commensurate to love: I had survived the monster, and all I wanted was to go back and be tossed around again.
What do you notice about this final paragraph? What are this narrator’s takeaways? How does he express them? Does it feel to you like a satisfying conclusion, one that helps you understand a larger meaning?
Now Try This: Finish These Sentence Starters
To think about what you learned from an experience you’ll be writing about — or what you would like your readers to take away from it — you might begin with one of these sentence starters. But consider these simply ways to prime your thinking. Later, you can go back and edit out our “sentence starter” beginnings and make the reflections your own.
You know that scene in “Lady Bird” when Saoirse Ronan throws herself out of a moving vehicle to avoid talking to her mother for another second? That was the author, at 14, in the car with his father.
It had been an ordinary Wednesday afternoon at my rural Indiana high school until the Journey tribute band appeared. Principal Day canceled sixth period so that the entire student body could catch a preview of the group’s Friday-night concert.
That’s the first paragraph of this essay, but what happens next turns on details our narrator reveals in the next two paragraphs — that she is from a strict Calvinist household, and is struggling to fit in at a new school. That background is enough to provide the tension as we get to this moment:
The lead singer had feathered hair and crotch-hugging jeans. “Just like the real Steve Perry!” Violet squealed. The band performed a couple of lesser-known Journey songs before the keyboardist played the opening chords of the ballad “Faithfully.” Tribute Steve jogged down the stairs at the side of the stage and walked down our row. He stopped in front of me and reached out a hand. My shrieking friends forced me to take it.
Read the full essay and identify elements of the narrative arc as you go.
What is the basic “Somebody Wanted But So” of this story?
How does the writer establish and heighten the conflict via details about who she is, what she wants and how she feels? Where, specifically, does she do that?
What other elements of classic dramatic structure can you find? How does this writer transition between them? For instance, after the narrator walks off the stage, how does she take us forward in time? What other transitions can you identify?
What is the role of the final paragraph?
Now Try This: Identify Your Own ‘Somebody Wanted But So’
If you have already started working on a personal narrative essay, whether for our contest or not, what is your “Somebody Wanted But So”? That is, do you have all the elements of a complete story? If not, what are you missing? If you are doing this exercise in a classroom, you might trade essays with a partner and try to answer that question about his or her work too.
Don’t forget: Something needs to happen in a narrative essay, but that “something” can be quite small. For instance, you could imagine retelling the plot of “Desperately Seeking Christy,” an additional mentor text we recommend below, in just a couple of sentences, but what makes it a wonderful essay is how the writer fleshes it out and makes us care about the narrator and what she wants.
Finally, after you’ve been working with the concept of narrative arc a bit, you might be amused by the cartoonist Grant Snider’s “The Story Coaster,” which he originally drew for The New York Times Book Review. Do you have your own “lengthy prologue” “plot holes” or “extraneous scenery” that might disrupt the ride for those on your “story coaster”?
What happened when the writer “secreted” a ’90s supermodel.
Questions About Story Arc for Any Narrative Essay
Retell the story in just a sentence, or by identifying the elements in a “Somebody Wanted But So” framework. Now, go further and look closely at each paragraph of the essay to identify how the writer constructs a narrative arc. What do the individual paragraphs do to advance it?
How does the writer move the action along, yet still describe the setting and the characters, and give any background information necessary for understanding what’s happening? What lines or individual words or phrases do that especially well?
When you think of The New York Times, you probably think of front-page news, but The Times also has a long tradition of publishing personal essays, and you can find new ones online nearly every day if you know where to look.
For this new contest, our main inspiration is the long-running New York Times Magazine Lives column. Like that feature, which ran from 1996 to 2017, and included essays on everything from eating ramen to experiencing an emergency plane landing to wearing a monkey suit to work, we’re looking for “short, powerful stories about meaningful life experiences.” We want to hear your story, told in your unique voice.
Beyond a caution to write no more than 600 words, our rules are fairly open-ended. We’re not asking you to write to a particular theme or to use a specific structure or style; instead, we hope you’ll experiment and tell a tale that matters to you, in a way you enjoy telling it.
Take a look at the full guidelines and related resources below. As always with a new contest, we expect there will be many questions. Please post them in the comments and we’ll answer you there, or write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.
Submission Form
2019 Contest Rules and Guidelines
1.Tell us a short, powerful story.
• Remember: This is not an invitation to give us your opinion on a topic you’re passionate about — we have a contest for that later in the year. Instead, your challenge is to tell a meaningful and interesting story — something with a beginning, middle and end. Because you’re telling a story rather than, say, simply reflecting on your feelings about a topic, there should be a conflict of some kind — an obstacle, problem or tension — that is resolved in some way.
• Keep in mind, however, that any story can work. It doesn’t have to be the most dramatic, life-altering thing that ever happened to you; it can, instead, be about baking brownies with your brother, or a conversation you had on Tuesday’s bus ride to school. It’s all in how you tell it.
• You’ll need to communicate not only what happened, but why it mattered to you. What is meaningful about this story? Why are you telling it?
2. Write it in your own real voice, with vivid descriptive language.
• This is an invitation to open up and write in a way that feels natural. We want your personality to come across.
• We also want your writing to be vivid and engaging, so that readers can imagine the scenes you describe and feel what the narrator is feeling. We hope you’ll edit until you’re happy with every word.
• Please also remember, however, to keep your audience in mind. You’re writing for a family newspaper, so, for example, curse words are out.
3. Keep it to 600 words.
Your narrative must be 600 words or fewer, not including the title. But remember: personal narratives don’t have to be long to be compelling. (Our submission form uses a word counter, so be sure to use only a single space between words and after punctuation, otherwise the tool might count extra spaces as additional words.)
4. For inspiration, you can look at entries in The Times Magazine’s long-running Lives column, as well as at our new Mentor Text series that gives you practice with the elements of a good narrative essay.
The essays in Lives are all about 800 words long, and all tell a short, powerful story in an engaging voice. We have used many of them as mentor texts to help point out what we’re looking for in this contest
5. Write something original.
Please don’t submit anything you have already published at the time of submission, whether in a school newspaper, for another contest or anywhere else. You are welcome to get help revising your essay, of course, but the work you submit should be fundamentally your own.
6. Submit only one narrative per student.
Submissions will be disqualified if we discover you have sent in more than one entry. Many of our contests allow students to work in teams, but for this one you must work alone.
7. For this contest, students in the United States and the United Kingdom must be from 13 to 19 years old to participate. However, if you are submitting from anywhere else in the world, you must be between 16 and 19 years old. Please see The New York Times’s terms of service for more details.
8. All entries must be submitted by Oct. 29, 2019, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern using the contest form above.
If you have questions about the contest, feel free to write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com.
9. We will use this rubric to judge entries,and the winning personal narratives will be featured on The Learning Network.
Your work will be judged by the Times journalists as well as by Learning Network staff members and educators from around the United States.
10.What is the “prize”?
Having your work published on The Learning Network and being eligible to be chosen to have your work published in print.
11.The children and stepchildren of the New York Times employees, or teenagers who live in the same household as a Times employee, are not eligible to enter this contest.
12. Finally, follow these instructions if you need proof that you entered this contest.
Within an hour of submitting your editorial, you should receive an email from The New York Times with the subject heading “Thank you for your submission to our Personal Narrative Essay Contest.” If you don’t receive the email within an hour, even after checking your spam folder, then you can resubmit your entry. Be sure your settings allow emails from nytimes.com.
If, after two attempts and waiting over one full day, you still have not received a confirmation email, you can contact us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com with the email address you used in the contest form. Use the subject heading “Please send me an email confirmation for my personal narrative essay contest submission.” Be sure to include your name and essay title (or subject) in your email. You may have to wait up to a week for a reply.
Our new feature spotlights examples of good narrative essays, and offers you practice in emulating them in your own writing. Have a look!
•A Collection of Writing Prompts
A list of 550 prompts that touches on everything from sports to travel, education, gender roles, video games, fashion, family, pop culture, social media and more. Like all our Student Opinion questions, each links to a related Times article that is free to read if you access it from our site.
Though this was written before we conceived of this contest, it suggests several ways to inspire your students’ personal writing, with advice on everything from avoiding “zombie nouns” to writing “dangerous” college essays.
We are running this contest concurrently with our Show Us Your Generation Photo Contest in which we challenge teenagers to examine stereotypes about people their age, then counter them with images to make that portrait more interesting, nuanced, complete or real.
Students can enter either contest or both, and are welcome to submit work on the same theme or topic for both. Teachers from different disciplines — Art and English, for instance — might consider working cross-curricularly to help guide submissions.
_________
The Learning Network runs contests for teenagers all year long. See our full calendar.
With tech experts calling the coming years the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the world’s abuzz with anticipation. And so it should be.
Given that the first industrial revolution saw the advent of steam engines, the second telephones, and the third computers, there’s no doubt that our lives are about to change. In fact, they already are.
The phrase ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ came about in 2015, and was coined by Klaus Schwab, the Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum. At the time, Schwab predicted that technology, communication and biology were going to be major players.
Four years on, the changes to our lives are becoming clear. As we progress further into this new, exciting (and sometimes scary) era, here’s what experts are predicting will happen.
The technology will finally drop
For a few years now, we’ve all heard that technologies such as driverless cars, AI robots and automation are on the cusp of appearing in our day-to-day lives. We have the technology, it’s just about integrating it with society.
In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we’ll go from simply being able to produce this technology, to fitting it into our lives.
4.0 technologies will include autonomous vehicles, AR, VR, big data, machine learning, mobile computing and more.
That means you’ll finally get to catch a driverless car home. Watch out Uber.
Your job will change
With this new tech appearing, the job landscape is going to change (and in many cases, it already has). For many of us, this means that the more hands-on elements of our roles will be automated.
In fact, clerical and office support workers will see 44% of their tasks automated. Even teachers will feel it, with 1 in 5 of their tasks automated.
But fear not. It’s not a case of technology taking our jobs. In fact, skilled human workers are set to be in shortage of around 1.5 million by 2022. More than ever, the workforce will need human-thinkers — those who can work in harmony with technology to get the most out of it.
Get ready to upskill
Finding new areas of your role that automation can’t cover will be key. Think human-centred skills, such as story-telling and emotional intelligence, and tech skills such as analytics. These will be worth their weight in gold across many industries.
For full-time workers, this is where upskilling online will be a ticket to remaining relevant. Online study in particular is a gateway to gaining micro-credentials that give you the skills to change alongside technology.
Start here
With today’s technologies doubling in capacity every 18 months, there has never been a better time to prepare yourself for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and your future career.
Considering honing your skills for the future workforce? You’re in the right place.
Through Open Universities Australia, you can gain skills ahead of the changes your career is likely to see. With hundreds of courses available to study online from leading Australian universities, preparing for the future has never been easier.
Every day, 43 million (and counting!) Coursera learners are redefining what’s possible.
From dorm rooms to lunch breaks, learners like Emmanuel, Kelly, Tristen, and Kara saw the opportunity to take a goal and turn it into a new reality.
We’re proud to be a global community where anyone, anywhere can come to Coursera to find expert instruction from world-renowned universities and companies and use what they learn to achieve their goals. From mastering new skills in a Specialization, to getting job-ready for a new career with a Professional Certificate, or transforming a career with a university degree or MasterTrack™ Certificate — on Coursera, anything is possible!
This back-to-school season, we’re celebrating the many ways that the Coursera community is redefining what’s possible. Read on to get inspired by some incredible Coursera learners. Then, share your own story with us using #RedefinePossible on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
How Emmanuel, Kelly, Tristen, & Kara are redefining what’s possible
Emmanuel mastered new technical skills to land his first full-time job
Emmanuel knew he wanted to work in tech after college, but he wasn’t sure how to get there. He was learning great critical thinking skills from his liberal arts program, but knew he needed more hands-on experience with data analysis, machine learning, the cloud, and more. When he started asking around for advice about how to land a technical internship, an engineer at Google recommended Coursera. One hundred courses later (we’re not exaggerating!), Emmanuel discovered not only the ability to master new technical skills, but he also rediscovered a love of learning.
“Learning from university and industry experts on Coursera gives me the chance to tackle topics that can seem intimidating and allows me to create a plan to take on those courses without the fear of failure.”
Not only did he gain new confidence for his technical interviews, he also had real work to showcase. Now he’s starting his new career as a software engineer at one of America’s biggest investment banks and he says he’s definitely not done learning.
“Coursera lets me know that even if I don’t know something, I can learn it. It’s allowed me to shape my career. I’m now working as a software engineer in New York City.”
Kelly tried a piece of a master’s program and used what she learned to start her Master of Education degree at the University of Illinois
Working at Yale, Kelly is immersed in both sides of the learning process. By day, she supports students and assists professors with coursework and research. By night, she switches hats to complete her own courses online. Knowing she preferred the flexibility of learning on her own time and at her own pace, Kelly enrolled in the Instructional Design MasterTrack™ Certificate from the University of Illinois to get a taste of a graduate degree.
“The fact that I could take just the two MasterTrack courses for a standalone credential with the option to apply the credits to a full degree program if I was accepted really made it an easy decision to enroll!”
Aftering completing the Instructional Design MasterTrack Certificate, Kelly applied and was accepted to the Illinois Master of Education Degree Program. She can’t wait to use what she learns to further her career at the intersection of technology and higher education.
“My primary goal was to determine if instructional design was something I wanted to pursue further. I was really hoping the MasterTrack program would be a springboard into a full master’s program, which it was. Goal achieved!”
Tristen got job-ready for his new IT career by learning from the experts at Google
Tristen first discovered his love for IT when he saw how he could use technology to help people. While in his second year of college, Tristen made the difficult decision to leave school in order to help his mother provide for their family. While he had to take a break from his studies, he never gave up on his dream of a career in IT. But for more than a decade, it was hard to find a way forward.
“Getting into IT always felt insurmountable, because it was either I had the time but not the money, or I had the money but not the time. When I discovered the Google IT Support Professional Certificate I knew: this is my gateway. This is my path. This is how I can get into IT.”
The path required dedication – he’d often make time to learn after the rest of his family had gone to sleep. In less than a year, his dedication paid off and he earned his Professional Certificate. When he saw an opening for a technology analyst, he went for it and used his coursework to demonstrate his new IT skills.
“After my supervisor saw my coursework, she was confident that I was the right person for the job. Thanks to the Google IT Support Professional Certificate, my family gets to see me finally achieve my dream of being in IT.”
Kara found new confidence from a quality MBA that fit her life
From working as a journalist to owning her own company, Kara’s career didn’t follow a straight path forward. She thought about getting her MBA for years, but with a full time job, two young kids, and a life she loved, finding a real degree that could fit into her life wasn’t easy. Most programs didn’t stack up to her objectives–real university learning without the impossible price tag. Then she found the iMBA from the Gies College of Business on Coursera.
“It’s a really big deal to offer an online MBA that’s a real MBA at a price that’s achievable. This program is totally disrupting higher education.”
As the first in her family to get a degree of any kind, Kara knew she was setting a powerful example for her kids. She used the modular nature of the iMBA to learn everywhere from poolside at swim meets to on the plane and in hotels when traveling. Every week she was learning something she could use at work the very next day from the top instructors at the Gies College of Business.
“I just wanted my kids to know you never stop – it’s never too late; a goal is something you can continue to work for even if it takes you awhile. Now I’m in a career I absolutely love and the MBA was a really important part of that.”
Commit to a new goal or celebrate a success: Use #RedefinePossible and @Coursera in your social media posts to show us how you’re redefining what’s possible
