Earning a graduate degree takes hard work. Earning a graduate degree while working at Marlborough, however, is even harder. Several Marlborough faculty and staff went back to school to get their second or third degrees.
Dean of Student Life Regina Rosi-Mitchell is currently taking online courses at the University of Pennsylvania to get a Masters of Education (M.S.Ed) degree in education entrepreneurship. Her previous degree was in Spanish, but when she started teaching entrepreneurship at Marlborough, she decided to pursue a degree in that topic. Rosi-Mitchell works hard to balance her personal life with Marlborough work and her degree.
“Working while going to school is incredibly, incredibly challenging. I have to get up at five in the morning to do reading for school because at night I have to do work for Marlborough, and I also want to spend time with my family,” Rosi-Mitchell said.
Head of Middle School Sean Fitts, who previously went to school to get a pre-Med degree and two undergraduate degrees, one in Marine Biology and one in Environmental Geosciences, as well as an M.S. in Earth Sciences, is working on a doctorate in education at USC focused on Organizational Change and Leadership.
“All of my other degrees are in science. Although I have worked in education for decades, and I have years of leadership experience, I wanted to study education at the deepest level. The program is allowing me to connect with other educators and think about leadership challenges from a different perspective,” Fitts said.
At Marlborough, according to Dean of Student Research Dr. Catherine Atwell, who went to USC during the 2017-2018 school year to obtain a doctorate of global education, some teachers do not have a degree in the subject they are teaching. Because there is an assumption that faculty will have a degree in the subject they are teaching, the teachers who don’t have one often want to gain a degree in that subject to solidify their qualifications to teach that subject.
Teachers are also considered more credible by students, parents and other teachers if they have a second or third degree, according to Atwell. However, Atwell believes that she placed internal pressure on herself to receive a degree because of her desire to learn.
“I went back to school because of the hunger I had to be a learner again and my want for intellectual stimulation. It felt like there was a deficit, something missing, that I really wanted to go after and something that I really needed to do for myself. Not for someone else, but for myself,” Atwell said.
Despite the hard work it took to obtain another degree, Atwell believes that going to school was worth the work because of the confidence she found within herself along the way.
