Business Outlook: Paul Meyer and Cassandra Petrofes

It’s not easy to balance a career and a master’s program.

Paul Meyer and Cassandra Petrofes are doing it anyway.

The two are part of different classes of the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management’s Executive Master’s of Business Administration, which is graduate program designed for business professionals.

Meyer just finished his first summer term of the two-year program, and Petrofes graduates in May.

Both say they’re getting a world-class education here in New Mexico and have already used the leadership skills learned at UNM in their outside careers.

Emerging leaders Meyer and Petrofes have decades of experience under their belts.

Meyer has lived all over the country and previously served in the submarine force of the U.S. Navy as a nuclear operator. Now, he works as health physics field coordinator at Los Alamos National Labs.

Petrofes is a certified public accountant and is the fund administration group at Thornburg Investment Management in Santa Fe.

Business Outlook, which focuses on small businesses, technology, emerging leaders and real estate, comes out on Monday afternoons on YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud and Apple Podcasts.

Here’s a snippet of Monday’s conversation.

How is the program going?

Petrofes: “It is an amazing program. We're very fortunate in New Mexico to have access to the global resources that we do have access to, and the EMBA program really fosters not just leadership skills and capabilities but also business ideas and ties to the community. And we've got amazing professors and some very challenging and interesting coursework.”

Meyer: “Pretty good. Just finished the summer term last month. Fall term is about to start in a couple of weeks. It's been amazing. Like Cassandra said, the professors are incredible.

I’m already taking lessons from the classes I learned and applying them to work, and seeing a dramatic improvement already in just coordinating with different groups and being a better leader for my people and helping them through their struggles and difficulties.”

What do you want to get out of the program?

Meyer: “My experience in the Navy helped me develop leadership skills, how to become a leader in the Navy, but what they don't really teach you is how to be a manager and how to combine leadership skills and management skills. …

What the EMBA program helps with is actually a formalized training program to help you become a better manager and a better leader.”

Petrofes: “I have learned a lot about myself and my own leadership capabilities and skills and competencies.

As a CPA, I'm required to do ethics trainings on a periodic basis, but this past summer, we did a contemporary legal and ethics issues for organizations course, and the conversations that we had were just incredibly eye-opening. There are so many things to consider when you're making business decisions.

And so that's been one of my biggest takeaways, is it's not just about fostering leadership, but how do you motivate, inspire and create a sustainable future for your stakeholders?

How do you balance the program and regular life?

Petrofes: “It can get a little intense, especially as you get close to final project deadlines toward the end of the semester.

But overall we meet for classes on Saturdays. There hasn't been so much homework assigned that you feel like you're drowning.

This past summer was a little intense just because the summer semester is very compressed, and so — because we didn't have the immersion week — we did have class meetings every single Saturday. And so it got a little intense.

But, again, the conversations and the lessons that we did, they were just so engaging and so deeply thought-provoking that it was really rewarding, despite the fact that we were working, working, working.”

Meyer: “So we're the same group of people going through the entire program together, and then we're subdivided into smaller teams with the group projects, and we get to know each other really well, and we can be flexible with each other. We know what's going on. We are open with communicating.

So that's how we find the time, is that we just talk to each other like, ‘Hey, I can't do this this day. I can do it this day.’ Just a lot of collaborating together.

And the professors are really flexible. They understand that we're mid-career. We're incredibly busy. We're all leaders in our own institutions. So they're also very flexible with deadlines and due dates. They'll help us out. They want us to succeed, and they’re really good at that.”