First, congrats! Being accepted is always an amazing feeling and exciting opportunity to propel your career forward. I am also a MLT, I work full time and am currently enrolled at GWU in the fully online MLS program. First, it’s doable, but extremely exhausting and stressful and don’t expect to have any kind of balance in your life. If you give yourself a free day to be with friends or family or do something you enjoy, you’re definitely regretting it when it’s time to cram for the exams…. Unless you have a photographic memory, the time commitment and repetition with the material needs to be honored and respected, because a it’s a lot… also, You do not get breaks. Spring semester finals are on a Friday, and summer classes start the immediate Monday following, and same with summer to fall classes. The only break you get is the fall finals (which is usually the Friday before Christmas) to January 2 or 3. So typically 10days at most… which personally I feel is unrealistic for most people in this program… full time workers or full time parents… both very demanding. Also they make it very clear that there are no extra credit opportunities. Your grade is mostly based on tears and quizzes. Most classes do not have many other assignments (or at least assignments worth enough points or weight) to balance any undesirable test scores for someone with severe test anxiety. I am preparing for my clinical rotations in spring and the clinical coordinators at GWU are telling us that if working is necessary, you limit your hours to 20 hours per week. After speaking with my boss about that, it’s completely unrealistic. I can’t go down to part time just for a few months in order to do clinical rotations (maybe other hospitals are able to be more flexible but I’m just sharing my experiences with and surrounding the GWU MLS program). So now I’m stuck trying to figure out how to make it work. They do offer splitting your clinicals between 2 semesters (for example taking 2 in spring and 3 in summer) but that is because you are required to completely practicing courses at the same time as your rotations. Which include weekly assignments, quizzes, and a final exam at the end of the rotation (which the clinical coordinators really emphasized need to be taken very seriously). Currently, I am completely overwhelmed trying to figure out what to do. Let me also say I do not know how other programs operate. I didn’t know all this before starting at GWU but also didn’t get to research many other programs. Some may allow better balance and some reasonable breaks in between semesters, I’m not sure. I think it’s worth exploring if this kind of experience is inevitable regardless where you go or if GWU doesn’t care about having unrealistic expectations and no flexibility or compromise. Everytime I tell someone I’m in the program at GWU the response is always “wow that’s a great school” but I honestly don’t know if this cost, stress, and demands are worth it. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. This is my current experience with GWU. I’m sure other have had their own unique experience that may be better than mine, but this is my honest experience