Commencement Brings Family Fulfillment

An offhand comment 13 years ago is leading to one of the better human interest Commencement stories in the history of UC's College of Business Administration (CBA).

Three members of the Metzger family will be receiving degrees from CBA on June 10, but this is not a siblings-only story. Carol Metzger, director of capital project reporting in UC's Construction Management office, will earn her MBA in finance along with her oldest son, Bruce. Adding to the family flavor at Commencement, Bruce's younger brother Curt will be receiving his bachelor's degree from CBA. (The third Metzger child, daughter Alicia, is a freshman in DAAP's fashion design program).

None of this was planned out, the Metzgers say. But it can be traced back to a statement Carol made when Bruce was about 12 years old and she was preparing to receive her bachelor's degree.

"I said to (Bruce) I would get my undergrad now and then we would get our master's degrees together later," Carol recalls. "So, three years ago, when Bruce was ready to graduate from engineering here at UC, he said he was ready to go for his master's and asked, ‘Mom, are you going to do it?' "

"I thought a master's was a good idea after earning my engineering degree," says Bruce, who has been in the part-time MBA program with his mom because of his day job as an engineer at Procter & Gamble. "When I came down to apply, she said grab me an application. I didn't really think she would do it. She was really late in filling everything out, which was partially my fault because I didn't pick everything up until about a month before it was due. It was a last-minute decision."

"Our first encounter with scholastic togetherness was taking the GMAT with each other," said Carol. "I was concerned about scoring well enough to be accepted into the program. It had been 10 years since my last exam. But it all worked out fine."

The Metzgers are believed to be the first parent-child pairing ever to receive MBAs at the same time from UC. "It's been pretty interesting," Bruce says. "In some ways, it's been a little bit different. A lot of people were surprised when they found out she was my mom, but we get along really well and it has been nice to have an automatic partner for group projects."

"We sat almost side-by-side in some classes, and he was not even embarrassed to have his mother sitting next to him," Carol jokes.

The Metzgers began work on their MBAs in the fall quarter of 1997. Was it strange for Bruce to be involved in classwork with someone who 20 years ago was teaching him the ABCs and the beginnings of his education? "It is weird," Bruce says. "Really what I think about is how amazing that must be for her."

"I've been really impressed just sitting next to him about what an intelligent guy he is," Carol says of Bruce. "He'll come up with questions and you can see that engineering background, how analytical he is. And then one day in our entrepreneurship class, he said, ‘Mom, I didn't know that you knew all that stuff. I don't seem like mom to him as much as just... someone he is studying with."

Both Carol and Bruce are members of Beta Gamma Sigma, the honorary society for business programs. "It was really interesting when I found out (they were mother-son)," says assistant professor of management Chamu Sundaramurthy. "When I saw the names I had assumed it was a husband-and-wife situation. I was really touched, actually."

All the Metzgers – including the family's dad, whose name is also Bruce – will attend Commencement and then head home for one very large graduation party. "We're all going to finish at the same time, we've all succeeded with what we set out to do," says son Curt. "We've visualized this day for a while."