In case you are wondering ...

why I quit my job to go to school fulltime, instead of having a fulltime job, take one class per semester, and also let the company pay for it! Here are my reasons in no particular order:

1. My school's classes are during the day. The school is about half an hour driving from work. The parking is not that easy around school. So to make sure I could find a parking space and make it to class on time, I had to leave work at least 45 minutes before my classes. So I estimated overall, I could have been away from work, in the middle of a day, almost four hours, two days a week! My boss would have never gone for that. My previous to last boss would have, I think, but not my last boss!
2. It is stated on the department's website that most of the graduate students there are fulltime and that it is encouraged that students attend fulltime! When I read that my impression was that they did not want to say part-time students do not have much chance of getting in and finishing successfully! Just my impression, I could be wrong! Anyhow, I reasoned that most probably the professors' expectations are based on the fact that the main responsibility of students is their course work, and so the assignments, the exams, and basically the work expected, shall be based on that assumption. I thought if I wanted to do well in my classes, I needed to allocate enough time for school. Again, my boss was not very good at scheduling and staying true to his scheduled task; he reprioritized on a whim, and expected everyone to adjust accordingly! I knew myself that work always came first. I thought if something unexpected came up at work, I would put school second, and thus my school work would suffer; I did not want that.
3. In the past few years I had seen coworkers and friends taking classes while working fulltime and being miserable! They had mentioned on numerous occasions that they are not getting as much as they want out their classes. That they are not paying as much attention as it was required of them to their classes. That they are just getting by, and hoping for a B. My goal to go to school was learning. I wanted to take on the projects that needed new knowledge, the knowledge that I was not able to acquire on my own. So I needed to go to school and be taught. I wanted to take advantage of being taught. Just passing the courses was not acceptable to me.
4. Going to school part-time would have taken me at least three years to complete my degree. Three years that I had to put up with my then current boss. He was a micromanager, and for someone who was not micromanaged, not even during her first years after college, was not an easy thing to handle! Plus if he knew what he was doing, I would have respected it, but he did not! He made mistakes left and right, and instead of trying to fix them and move on, he would point fingers at anyone that the pointing would have sticked! The only reason he became a boss and not a more qualified person, with many more years of experience in our industry, was that he was hired there first, and the more qualified people where brought in during the merger. So I suppose it was like the difference between one's biological child and one's adopted child to people that distinguish them apart! I thought since he was not very kin in me going to school, I could become an easy target to point at if he needed to point at someone! And probably I had to fix the problem, and fast, and of course again school would have suffered while I was paying extra attention to work.

I could have handled being a fulltime student and work part-time. I actually preferred that arrangement. But my boss did not go for it. I believe my previous to last boss would have! So it all came down to my last boss did not support me being both an employee and a student!