Both of us work in senior leadership roles –
I work in the health sector and Gordon in the disability sector.
And we were looking for something different,
we were looking for something to stretch us academically
but also to develop us in our roles at work
and so the MBA was a natural choice.
As in Bradford, why did we choose Bradford?
I mean it was in the top 10 internationally so that was a big pull,
and the distance learning, that was a big deal to us.
We didn’t need to be going to necessarily be meeting new people,
we had a lot of work contacts so that practicality was really important to us, wasn’t it?
It was, just to add a couple of things.
1: we were leaders in our field but that was a fairly specific area
and so the MBA gave us an opportunity to broaden that thinking beyond our sector
into to, what some may call, the real world of business and the rest,
so that was also a factor.
The other thing was we were planning to immigrate to New Zealand
and felt that having masters degrees would add weight to the overall application.
We did the first compulsory modules the same and we tied them all together
and then we could choose in the second year,
so we chose slightly different ones, didn’t we?
I found it really helpful to be perfectly honest,
I was never going to compete with marks but found it helpful
with Helen just being around doing the same thing.
What really happened was that we had no social lives for about two and a half years
but because we were both doing it...
It was better, again it worked for us,
like for other people if one of us was just doing it
then the other would have found it quite hard,
so working together was fine.
When we did the first module which was ‘People and Organisations’,
do you remember we both wrote our essays separately
and then we said we would swap and read each other’s
and then give constructive criticism and that was tough,
that was a really tough moment,
going "oh oh, what'll he say"
and we have different complimentary skills so it worked quite well.
When we handed in our dissertations in on that September 4th
we then got the news at night about the first earthquake
so we were in the UK and the news came through
that Christchurch had just had an earthquake and we felt terrible at that time
because we were in transition and we felt we weren’t with the community
that we wanted to be a part of and they were struggling with the earthquake,
and then, of course, we emigrated in the December
and the fatal earthquake hit in February
and it had ramifications for the house and building
and even one of our project managers on the build
his mother was unfortunately killed in the earthquake
so it effected everyone, didn’t it?
Yeah, it was absolutely massive, we thought we had missed it,
although we were very pleased to have missed it we also wondered what we had missed,
and then of course that was the September one,
this one was a so-called after shock and it was smaller in scale
but actually because it hit the city
the devastation was extraordinary and extremely frightening.
Helen was right in the middle of it on the 4th floor in the city centre,
had an awful experience,
I was here, we are just over an hour away from the city
and the earth was just, I could see the road moving,
I was just outside the house, we were at the sort of painting stage,
right at the end of the building programme and what was,
the road was moving up and down, and my only thought was to call Helen
to say don’t come home, there has been a terrible earthquake here,
not thinking that it was going to be worse.
My daughter said we should have gone on Grand Designs
because everything happened including that
and then the pound was plummeting against the New Zealand dollar at the time,
over a third, over a very short period.
New Zealand government increased the VAT equivalent, GST here,
and the build stretched beyond the Christmas that we had planned to move in
and we actually moved in in the Easter,
so everything was sort of going horribly wrong
as far as our financial situation was concerned.
What was really disappointing for me was not having the opportunity to graduate,
because we planned our emigration around Bradford completely,
everything was around Bradford,
and we were due to graduate the day before I flew to New Zealand
and Helen was coming about 3 weeks later
and you had 9 inches of snow
which meant that the ceremony was postponed to the July
which of course meant that we couldn’t come
so that’s the only thing, my only regret.