{"id":3071,"date":"2026-08-03T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/graduateprograms\/?p=3071"},"modified":"2026-08-03T13:39:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T17:39:57","slug":"navigating-grad-school-rebecca-pettingill-on-balance-growth-and-resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/graduateprograms\/2026\/08\/03\/navigating-grad-school-rebecca-pettingill-on-balance-growth-and-resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"Navigating Grad School: Rebecca Pettengill on Balance, Growth, and Resilience"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Navigating Grad School: Rebecca Pettingill on Balance, Growth, and Resilience\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/1DVneeKk2X5tADjTGwwoxO?si=45e8572cc4a44610&amp;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Are you considering graduate school, currently navigating your graduate journey, or reflecting on your academic path? The latest episode of <em>Victors in Grad School<\/em> delivers invaluable advice and reassurance for anyone on this transformative journey. Hosted by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/drchristopherlewis\/\"><strong>Dr. Christopher Lewis<\/strong><\/a> and featuring special guest <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/rebeccapettengill\/\"><strong>Rebecca Pettengill<\/strong><\/a>, Manager of Foundation and Corporate Relations at the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, the conversation centers on not just navigating graduate school, but truly thriving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A Non-Linear Academic Journey<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the most striking themes from this episode is Rebecca Pettengill\u2019s unconventional path. Her undergraduate degree took 13 years to complete due to balancing full-time work and part-time studies, proving that there\u2019s no single right way to pursue higher education. She\u2019s candid about the challenges and delays, yet highlights how building relationships during her undergraduate years later supported her academic and professional pursuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Strategic Choices and Growth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When selecting a graduate program, Rebecca Pettengill intentionally chose an MBA over a master&#8217;s in public administration to diversify her resume and broaden her opportunities. The cohort structure of the program offered much-needed structure and camaraderie, making the rigorous journey more manageable. She also underscores how workplace flexibility and supportive family dynamics were key in finding a balance between professional, academic, and personal responsibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Navigating Barriers and Self-Doubt<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill is refreshingly honest about the hurdles she encountered\u2014especially preparing for the GMAT after years away from mathematics. Her perseverance, conditional admission, and commitment to hard work were pivotal to her success. Study groups and supportive peers, including international students, created a collaborative environment where everyone\u2019s unique strengths contributed to collective achievements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Impostor syndrome and self-doubt are realities for many, and Rebecca Pettengill is no exception. She shares how working with a diverse cohort and celebrating small wins helped her realize everyone brings something valuable to the table\u2014even when uncertainty creeps in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The Power of Relationships<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Strong relationships were central to Rebecca Pettengill\u2019s journey\u2014whether with faculty who became mentors or classmates who evolved into a reliable professional network. These bonds didn\u2019t just provide academic support; they continued to open career doors and create opportunities long after graduation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Advice for Future Graduate Students<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill encourages prospective graduate students to view a master\u2019s degree as both a commitment to themselves and a catalyst for lifelong learning. In a world of constant change, advanced education offers both adaptability and new possibilities\u2014regardless of your career stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ready to hear more firsthand wisdom and inspiring stories? Listen to this episode of <em>Victors in Grad School<\/em> for actionable strategies and a reassuring reminder: your unique path can lead to incredible success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Tune in now and take the next step in your graduate school journey!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>TRANSCRIPT<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:00:01]:<br>Welcome to Victors in Grad School, where we have conversations with students, alumni, and experts about what it takes to find success in graduate school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:11]:<br>Welcome back to Victors in Grad School. I&#8217;m your host, Dr. Christopher Lewis, Director of Graduate Programs at the University of Michigan Flint. Really excited to have you back again this week. As always, every week, I love being able to sit down, talk to you, work with you as you are getting yourself ready to move toward those goals that you&#8217;ve set in front of you. And for you, it may be that you&#8217;ve already made that application to graduate school. Maybe you&#8217;re just thinking about graduate school. Maybe you&#8217;re in graduate school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:00:38]:<br>No matter where you are in this journey, it is a journey. Because if you&#8217;re at the very beginning or you&#8217;re getting close to the end, there are things that you can do right now to be able to find success in this graduate school journey. And that&#8217;s why this podcast exists. Every week, I love being able to bring you different tips, tricks, things that you can do, some things you can put into your own toolbox to help you to find that success. And that&#8217;s why every week I love being able to bring you different people with different experiences that have gone through graduate school themselves, and for them to allow you to learn from their experience to help you on your journey. Today we got another great guest. Rebecca Pettengill is with us today. Rebecca is the manager of Foundation and Corporate Relations at the Community Foundation of Greater Flint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:29]:<br>And she has her own graduate school journey, as I&#8217;ve already mentioned. She did her undergraduate work at the University of Michigan Flint, getting a bachelor&#8217;s degree in public administration, and then went on from there. We&#8217;ll talk about that. But I&#8217;m really excited to have Rebecca here. Rebecca, thanks so much for being here today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:01:46]:<br>Thank you, Christopher. I appreciate it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:01:48]:<br>Well, I really appreciate you being here and for sharing your own journey. And I wanna turn the clock back in time. I said that you did your undergraduate work here at the University of Michigan Flint. And once you got done And then with that degree, you went off, you got some experiences, and had some opportunities to work at the University of Michigan Flint doing development work. And at some point in that transition from undergrad into your professional life, you made a decision. You made a decision that you wanted to not be done. And you decided to go to graduate school. Bring me back to that point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:02:23]:<br>What was going through your head? And what made you decide that that was the right time? to go to graduate school?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:02:28]:<br>Well, I had sort of languished in earning my bachelor&#8217;s degree. I worked full-time and part-time all the while I was working on my degree. And of course, as you grow up, things change in your mind about what you hope for in your career or your life goals. And so, you know, I originally kind of started out in a business degree and then moved more to the public administration side. And that took me 13 years. I don&#8217;t recommend it highly to incoming freshmen to take that route, but because it delays your earning power later on in life. So, but anyway, I did take that path and everything happens for a purpose, I think, in life and all your experiences add up. So I had a lot of courses all throughout the university and with my career at U of M Flint, actually that turned out to be beneficial because Professors knew me, other department secretaries knew me, people in administration knew me, and, you know, that served me well going forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:03:38]:<br>And then I decided to add the master&#8217;s degree and just to expand my resume, I decided to do the business degree for my master&#8217;s for a couple reasons. Just like I said, to make my resume a little more broad. And to give me other experiences. At the time, I was working at the recreation center, which was very much considered a business unit at the campus at that time. And so we had goals there as far as earning our keep and not costing the university too much money. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:04:18]:<br>So you decided to do the MBA and going through the MBA program, you got your bachelor&#8217;s in public administration and you could have done a master&#8217;s in public administration or some other type of a degree. What was it about the MBA that made you decide that that was the right fit and the right program for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:04:35]:<br>Well, it was really at the time a little bit where I was at the recreation center in managing the business office there. And then also in the undergrad program, I had taken a lot of the courses, or a number of the courses were shared as master&#8217;s and bachelor&#8217;s courses. So I had had some coursework that was already part of the public administration master&#8217;s. So that was sort of an impetus to do something different with the master&#8217;s level degree. And so the MBA was kind of in my wheelhouse of experience and so on. I also was drawn to it a little bit because at that time it was set up as a cohort. And so I knew I&#8217;d have a set of people and I had a sort of a regimented progression to get through it. And that was helpful as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:05:30]:<br>Now, for everyone that goes through a graduate program, you go through a transition. You go through a transition from going from undergrad into first, it was for you, for work. And then you went from work back into school after a few years of not being in school. And there is a distinct transition because the way you&#8217;re educated as an undergraduate student is not the same as the way in which you&#8217;re educated as a graduate student. And you have to do things to not only set yourself up for success, but be able to prepare yourself for ultimate success throughout the program. So as you think back to that graduate degree and going through the MBA, what were the things that you had to do to set yourself up for success as you transitioned into the program? And what were some of the things that you had to do to maintain that success throughout the entire journey?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:06:19]:<br>Yeah, a big challenge actually was the GMAT test. And that was where my relationships through campus kind of paid off because they took a chance on me. I didn&#8217;t score very well in the mathematics section. It had been a long time since I had been in high school mathematics and done those things. And even my undergrad mathematics were something that I took early on. So that was quite a challenge to prepare for that test, to go into it. And I was fortunate they gave me a conditional admit, but I had good grades to back it up and worked hard. And that was where all Also, it was really nice to work with study groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:07:03]:<br>Some of us ended up, because it was a cohort, we kind of followed together. And so there was a group of us that worked together and that was helpful too. We had a nice young man from China who was in our cohort and he was very, very helpful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:07:19]:<br>Now, when you go into graduate school and you&#8217;re going through this while you&#8217;re working and you were working while you were going through this education, there is truly a balance that you have to find. Whether it&#8217;s through not only your schoolwork, but also balancing work and family and personal responsibilities. Talk to me about what you had to do to find that balance for yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:07:44]:<br>Well, I was kind of fortunate because where I worked at the rec center, the office was open a lot. They were open long hours to accommodate members and students. And so I could kind of flex my time if I needed to. Like if I had an exam coming or something like that, I was able to flex my time a little bit. That was helpful. And then also with my particular family life, my husband always worked late as a UPS driver. And so I had a lot of downtime right after work that I was able to utilize to attend classes. Most of my classes were at night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:08:23]:<br>And so that worked out in my instance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:08:27]:<br>I was able to negotiate some of those barriers that other people might Every student goes through a point in which, like you said earlier, when you were going through that GMAT and you hadn&#8217;t had math in a really long time, that you feel like, am I made for this? Is this right? Am I good enough? And there&#8217;s that feeling of imposter syndrome or self-doubt that sneaks in. Talk to me about how you faced imposter syndrome or self-doubt during your graduate studies, and how did you handle it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:08:58]:<br>You know, it&#8217;s interesting because I think In the different courses, there were different challenges. And so, I remember a lot of our people at that time were working at General Motors, and they were engineers and different things like that. And I remember one of the courses that we had was a simulation where we had to create a business and sell the product and up our manufacturing and all of that. And this One fellow and I ended up in a group together, and neither of us really had that experience, but he had a lot of experience in sales. And so we, against all odds, we ended up prevailing in that simulation on a number of occasions, having sales and being able to amp up production because he knew enough about sales to understand all that. And it just showed me that people that might not seem the strongest for your team or the effort sometimes come through and have that secret sauce that you need to be successful. And it showed the benefit of working with other people with other abilities and strengths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:10:21]:<br>So as you were going through your graduate school journey and you talked about connecting with students like you did in that experience and going through graduate school, a lot of times one of the things that&#8217;s important is building those relationships and building relationships with other cohort members, but also building relationships with faculty. Talk to me about the relationships that you were able to build and what relationships ended up being most impactful for you and why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:10:48]:<br>Well, the course that my career took after having the MBA, I ended up working in the development office or institutional advancement, it might be called now, and I ended up Being the first person that worked in corporate and foundation relations at U of M Flint, there were people in the Ann Arbor campus, and that was helpful to have them as mentors, I would say. But having a diverse set of experiences ended up serving me well in that position, having to assess opportunities for the campus and then knowing the faculty and being able to find out who might be able to take on the opportunity, the grant opportunity or research opportunity. Understanding a little bit about research and how that works was really helpful. And so all of those things kind of just added up to make this a really good fit. Getting that business understanding, having those\u2014 the faculty members to go back to and ask questions. And then the ongoing relationships with different students that were in my, my MBA cohort mostly has been really rewarding. We had a lot of really good people that were in our group and we got quite close, I would say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:12:13]:<br>Now, thinking back to your graduate school experience and thinking about what you had to do to find success in that journey, and you think\u2014 and thinking about others that are thinking about graduate school for themselves, no matter if it&#8217;s in the MBA or some other area, what are some tips that you might offer others considering graduate education that would help them find success sooner?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:12:34]:<br>Because my experience is heavily with the university in the beginning, I would say that if you are able to pursue the master&#8217;s degree, whatever it might be, I think there&#8217;s great benefit in having the bachelor&#8217;s degree and the basis of information that provides you for life and for many different types of experiences. And then to be able to go on and add another layer to that at the master&#8217;s level, I think it demonstrates a commitment to yourself as an individual and your willingness to continue to learn in life. And it&#8217;s just so important, especially now as things are changing so fast in our world. And new discoveries and all of those things. It&#8217;s important to have that extra learning, and I just highly recommend it. It just gives you so many more options and opportunities to pursue, especially when you&#8217;re younger. Well, even when you&#8217;re an old lady like me, it served me well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:41]:<br>Well, Rebecca, I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your own journey in your graduate education, and I truly wish you all the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Rebecca Pettengill [00:13:50]:<br>Thank you very much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr. Christopher Lewis [00:13:51]:<br>The University of Michigan-Flint has a full array of master&#8217;s and doctorate programs if you are interested in continuing your education. Whether you&#8217;re looking for in-person or online learning options, the University of Michigan-Flint has programs that will meet your needs. For more information on any of our graduate programs, visit umflint.edu\/graduateprograms to find out more. Thanks again for spending time with me as you prepare to be a victor in grad school. I look forward to speaking with you again soon as we embark together on your graduate school journey. If you have any questions or want to reach out, email me at flintgradoffice@umflint.edu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Are you considering graduate school, currently navigating your graduate journey, or reflecting on your academic path? The latest episode of Victors in Grad School delivers invaluable advice and reassurance for anyone on this transformative journey. 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