 We know that the path through all our courses is a long one, and I think I can speak for every member of our team when I say that we are impressed by our graduates. We also know from our entrance surveys that 75% of you are already professionally employed when you begin our program, and we know from our exit surveys that you spend between 6 and 15 hours per week doing your coursework. This quite naturally leads to the question, how do these amazing graduates get it done? My name is David Corell, I'm a course lead in the MITx MicroMasters Program in Supply Chain Management. To answer this question, I turn to them. In this video, we'll be presenting you with testimonials from learners who have passed all the courses and the CFX, and even came to campus for the blended program and graduated that as well. These are truly inspiring people. We hope these tips will be helpful to you. Hi, I'm Laura and I'm from San Juan, Argentina. Hello, I'm Harish Shama, I'm a Supply Chain ERP consultant working in the IT industry. Hey everybody, I'm Colleen Gopley and I'm from Mansfield, Massachusetts in the US. Hi, I'm Sindhu and I'm from Bangalore, India. Hello everyone, I'm Tarso from Brazil. Hi, I'm Rafa. My name is Alexander Suvastro and I come from a beautiful island called Sicily in Sarbanade. Hi everyone, I'm Meji. Hi, my name is David. I'm originally from New Jersey. These great learners shared with us several tips and some of them apply before the course even starts. In a consulting world, there's never a dull moment. You're pretty busy, particularly when you're in an applying-facing role. On a personal front, I am married and have got two lovely schoolgoing kids. When I appeared for MicroMasters, rather decided for it, it had been like around 20 years since I had moved out of college when I decided to do my MicroMasters. When I was starting my MicroMasters journey, I had actually just taken a brand new full-time job in additive manufacturing in a new state in the US. So I was moving to a new job in a new state. I had actually just gotten engaged to get married, so I was planning a wedding. And we just got a puppy, so we had to do some training with him while he was still a puppy. So for me, time management was huge. So how did I plan for my MicroMasters? The most important thing I would say I did was to talk to my family early on, to talk to them about my plans. It was very important to have their support because this was a long journey which would have not been possible without their support. So my main, main piece of advice for anyone starting the MicroMasters is that first week when they release the curriculum, they're actually going to give a pretty thorough list of what you're going to learn every single week. And what you can do is take that list and try to go through and identify what modules do you think you have experience in and probably don't need to dedicate a ton of time to, or you think you may struggle and need to dedicate more time to. So for me, that was the supply chain finance modules because that was brand new to me. And also any time we were learning a new software package or a new coding language, anything like that, they tend to give you a really good heads up when that's going to happen. So you can take your academic schedule and take your personal schedule and make sure that you're not going to have any big conflicts and identify that ahead of time and be proactive. So now, let's say you've heeded that good advice before the course begins, but it's course time now and you need to find hours in your busy week to do the work. First and first routine, you need to put aside a one to three hours and that's seven days a week, most of the time. It's not always going to be like that, but that's the average. In order to find the time that when you have no time, you need to think about all the pauses, all the commuting time, all the social media interactions that you actually do every day and minimize that, compress that to a minimum so that at the end of the day, every little slice of time available is going to be dedicated to study for the MicroMaster. And if you do that, you're going to be successful. When I completed my MicroMasters, I worked full time supervising the procurement of services for a major mining company in South America. And of course, I also managed my household at home, which includes a house plan, a dog and lots of friends and family. Here's how I got it done. So during weekdays, I didn't have a lot of extra time, so I managed to go through all the videos and lectures during the weekdays, but late night after dinner. That was the best moment at home, where there was no noise at all and we didn't have any phone calls or anything else to handle. With that, we can't be all about practice problems and related assignments. I also got a couple of extra days if anything unexpected happened could be with your family, with your job, with anything unexpected in the platform that might not work. So I think it's important to have this couple of extra days. Since I was working full time, studying during the weekdays was not an option for me as my place of work was far away from my home and any additional time that I had during the weekdays was spent on travelling. I used to start studying on Saturday mornings by going through all of the course videos, getting done with the quick questions and reach the practice problems at least by Saturday evening or Sunday morning. I used to dedicate Sunday afternoon to the greater assignments and have the Sunday evening to myself. Of course, some of the course works which were tough would spill to the next week which I would try to get done while on the right to office or on the way back. When we solicited these video testimonials, we gave the graduates no direction as to what we expected to hear. There was one piece of advice that came up in multiple testimonials that I did not expect to see. Based on the first weeks of the course, I knew that I had to invest around eight hours per week to keep it getting good grades. The question was how to feed these eight hours on my agenda. So first, I used the wasted daily two hours driving time listening to classes like a podcast which saved me time in front of the computer. Also I identified that I lost efficiency after a couple of hours of studying so I prefer to break my weekly schedule into three sections of one hour and a half each on Friday, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays which were fine for me. But when I did the program, I was living in Washington, D.C., working full-time and my loving, supportive wife was pregnant with our triplets. So it was certainly a fun and chaotic time. And I remember trying to fit in the MicroMaster segments wherever I could. During a lot of my bus rides into work, I would get a few of those five to seven minute sessions in and try and capture those nuggets of knowledge and get a chance to practice some of those problems during a lot of those transit sessions. One of the best things about studying and teaching supply chain management is how immediately practical the best lessons can be. Many of our learners find that keeping an eye on this usefulness and practicality helps keep them motivated over a long journey. If you build an interest, if you make this useful for you, you are going to have a solid and genuine passion towards studying for your MicroMaster and that is going to bring you very, very far. I wanted to do this MicroMaster's program because I was doing demand planning and procurement for about three years in my daily job. And I wanted to see whether or not there are some theories and then additional understanding that can help make my job more efficient. After I took those classes, I implemented the safety stock like using calculations instead of like using my intuition. So I'm very grateful for learning everything. We are impressed that you are endeavoring to begin. I look forward to being impressed by you again on the other side. So don't worry. We've all been there facing this time management issue. I encourage you to find the first spots in your agenda and do the best why so use of your time. We are super happy to have you on board the MicroMaster experience. I totally enjoyed the course. It was a great experience. I'm sure it will be a great experience for you. So good luck. All the best. So best of luck. Have so much fun and congratulations on starting your MicroMaster's journey. Good luck to everyone. I know you can do it because I did it. And I did it while being a full-time employee in executive position and a family member. Overall, although the program was demanding, it was all worth it in the end. There were weeks that I lost track of my schedule and I had to prioritize the studying over personal life and a little sleep. But it's doable. If thousand of us made it, you can make it. Make your study plan as it works best for you. Keep going and be part of our team. It's okay not to be perfect and learning is hard, especially I am a working mom. It's hard for me to find time always to study every week. Take it slow. If I don't pass the first time, then I'll take the class again. Every time I learn more and more and eventually I'll pass it. So just slow and steady. It certainly takes a commitment and will be a big drain on time and energy. But I hands down a worthwhile investment that I'm very glad that I stuck through and achieved and greatly benefited from. So best of luck and look forward to seeing you all at the alumni reunions.