When Dana Varon found herself pregnant with her second child, the stress of balancing careers and raising children took its toll. After being married for 15 years, she decided to pursue an executive MBA degree at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). Unfortunately, her employer, Wells Fargo, would not allow her to take the Professional Management Program offered through the school. Dana was devastated, since she had always believed that an MBA would help open doors for her in the corporate world. However, Dana wasn’t prepared for how much her skills had declined over the years, especially as it pertained to her professional height and gender.
Varon pursued her MBA from NYIT via distance learning, traveling distance from her home in Pennsylvania to attend classes at the Wells Fargo Career Advancement Center on East Consignment Street in Philadelphia, PA. Although Wells Fargo had an extensive library of job-related materials, including manuals on everything from human resources to finance, Varon found the lack of reading material in Career Advancement’s library extremely limiting and difficult to navigate. She felt as though she had missed out on much of the experience necessary to prepare her for the executive MBA degree. While some of the reading material seemed interesting, she felt that much of it was geared toward those already working in the corporate sector. This, coupled with her lack of self-confidence when it came to approaching males for a relationship, turned her away from pursuing this goal.
Varon pursued an online studies program at the Art Institutes of Pittsburgh, focusing on communications, marketing, and public relations. Surprisingly, she discovered that while she had spent many years working in the corporate world, her communication skills were far from what she had expected. This, combined with the realization that height and gender had become important issues for the new parents she served, inspired Varon to begin working on a book about parent-child relationships. Although she had been accepted into a Master’s program at Case Western Reserve University, Varon would ultimately choose to continue her educational endeavors on a more personal level.