BY Sydney LakeJune 03, 2022, 4:03 PM
A student rides a bicycle past the bell tower on the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., as seen in October 2012. (Photographer: Daniel Acker—Bloomberg/Getty Images)
After graduating from Goshen College in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in business and economics, Clara Swald went on to pursue a career in customer service. While she says she got a great education from Goshen, “I think I chose the wrong program for me,” she tells Fortune.
Swald worked for nearly two decades in customer service and sales jobs, eventually landing at Harman International, a branch of Samsung. But when the company started closing plants in Elkhart County, Ind., where Swald was working, she reevaluated her career plans and explored graduate degree programs.
Because Swald studied business and economics as an undergrad, she was looking for something different from an MBA so that she could develop new marketable skills. Then she landed on psychology.
Swald graduated from Purdue University’s online master’s in psychology program with a concentration in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology in 2020 and now works as a human resources generalist with the Mennonite Central Committee, a relief service organization. Fortune sat down with Swald to find out why she chose to pursue her degree online.
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How a master’s in psychology led to a role in HR
Fortune: Why did you decide to pursue your master’s in psychology online as opposed to in-person?
Swald: When I started searching, I found Indiana University. They had a I/O psychology program, but it wasn’t online. I was looking for it to be online was because I’m a mom of two girls; I’m a wife. And I knew that it would be hard, and I would also be working full-time. It would be hard for me to go to a building for my classes.
I don’t know if this is all women, but we tend to do a lot more, a lot of stuff all at once. So I knew that the online …….