my life

Diana,

I’m inclined to say “good luck!” but preparedness trumps luck, and it sounds like you’re prepared. Let’s just leave it at “you go girl!”

I like the remark about pointing a gun at your head and making you eat ice cream. Just remember - if you’re doing what you like to do, don’t let them see you smile. (My motorcycle instructor told us he knew we were ready to move on to the next lesson when he could see us smiling as we rode through the exercises.)

It’s interesting that the Air Force is putting less emphasis on master’s degrees for officers. Do you know why? At first I wondered if it was because of the drop in enlistments due to the actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I’ve also heard that AF and Navy enlistments haven’t dropped - it’s mostly been the Army and Marine Corps feeling the pinch.

Too bad you’re not likely to get a teaching assignment to West Point. Then you could enjoy our lovely New York winter weather. (Yes, I’m still jealous that you were mowing grass while I was shoveling snow. But I’d gladly shovel snow if it meant I could move to Colorado Springs.)

Let us know how things are progressing!

Dave

They’ve changed their promotion requirements because they have scads of officers taking some of the focus from their actual jobs/careers and focusing on off-duty education so they could “put the check in the box.” It has never mattered what master’s program officers pursued, so long as they got one that was recognized by the AF. The AF ends up with a bunch of officers who are highly educated but with less expertise in their particular field than they should have.

Now, the AF will determine whether you should have more education, at which point you’ll be sent to get it, at AF expense and on AF time. We are, however, encouraged to continue pursuing degrees for our own personal satisfaction/goals.

Instead of using degrees as discriminators, they’re now using deployments. (You knew they’d replace it with SOMETHING, now didn’t you?)

Of course, I’m of the opinion that degrees will still be discriminators at some level, and while they aren’t officially in your paperwork anymore, the board will be able to tell in many cases if you have a master’s anyway. If you’re selected for AFIT, that’s an actual assignment, and will appear on your paperwork. If you’re selected for any job that requires a master’s degree, they’ll know, as well.

d

Diana,

Are they using deployments as discriminators now because there are so many more opportunitites? (Grin) Actually it makes sense. Deployment is closer to the military’s core compentency (don’t you just love buzzwords?) than academics.

In the private sector most companies only support continuing education that benefits them. An MA in Basketweaving isn’t going to get much employer support. (Unless you work for Longaberger, I guess.)

Your remark about the MBA being the “officer’s degree” struck a familiar note. The conventional wisdom in my field is that an engineering BS with an MBA makes one a hot property. (Not as an engineer, however.) There are certainly enough after-hours MBA programs being offered. I have to wonder if there are so many MBAs running around that it’s no longer useful as a discriminator.

Dave

I think that’s why the MBA is generally the “sought-after” masters: (1) the coursework isn’t terribly challenging or time-consuming, so it’s something that can reasonably be done after work in a year, (2) so many colleges offer it (many of them online), and (3) it supposedly teaches you something extra about management, which presumably makes you more promotable than the guy who knows just as much through common sense but doesn’t have the paper to prove it.

Can you tell I don’t think much of MBAs? I’m sure it was the worthless MBA program I was in (2/3rds of the way through), and not MBAs themselves, though. Surely they wouldn’t be so popular/sought after if there were all as worthless as the one I was in. Surely.

d

Diana,

There must be (or must have been) a high demand for MBA degrees, but I’m not sure if it’s the companies doing the promoting or the people trying to get promoted. (I haven’t been blessed with working for a company where typical coporate hiring and promotion practices are common. I’ve mostly worked at small companies - 150 or fewer employees - in a single facility. With such a small talent pool promotions in management tend to fall to the one person who might know how to do the job. It’s rare to have multiple candidates.)

For whatever reason, colleges decided that there’s sufficient demand to justify all the different MBA programs. Whether a given program is worthless or not really depends on how much of a difference it made in the grad’s career.

I’d love to see a survey of MBAs and people in the same jobs who decided to take their chances without it. I’d also like to see the data broken down by MBA grantor, or even the cost of the program, versus career results (salary, responsibility, number of reports, etc). There’s not a college in existence that would pay for such a survey, though.

Dave

More good points, Dave.

To market MBAs, there doesn’t have to be a demand, provided you can create one. If you convince the “upwardly-mobile” that they need an MBA, the facts of the matter are immaterial. (In order to market deoderant, I’ve heard it said, people had to first be convinced that their natural body odor was bad.)

d

Diana,

You’re in the wrong field. You should be on Madison Avenue. (Grin)

One of my favorite failed attempts at creating a market was that produce cleanser they were pushing a few years ago. Suddenly the biggest health threat in America was unwashed produce!

Dave

I recall an MBA class-taker that I know who had an entire section devoted to object linking and embedding between Microsoft Word and Excel. “Wow,” I thought, “that’s pretty intense.”

Mind you, when I heard this, I was thinking from a software developer’s standpoint of the the registration of document types and the interaction fo separate instances of software running in the safety of their own application space sharing information through event queues and interprocess messaging to provide dynamic updates to both documents no matter which end of the link was modified.

The class was teaching how to copy selected cells in Excel and paste them into Word (so you don’t have to make a table in Word). They got to use both keystroke shortcuts and menu items.

Another MBA student I know took some performance reporting (generated by scripts and software I wrote and introduced) that diagnosed a variety of system logs and results of internal software queries, and reformatted it into a pleasant presentation paper as a form of trend analysis. When he was showing me his masterpiece I explained to him what some of the statistics actually portrayed.

While I concede that there may be some management tought in MBA courses that will help an individual be a better manager than someone who doesn’t take the courses, the bits and snippets I’ve seen make me believe someone should just give me one because I do all of that work now. Heck, I’ll even pay the fees for the classes (although I’ll have to refrain from purchasing any books on management lest someone think I can’t do the work…).

I kid. I kid.

But I think if I ever get around to finishing my BS, I’ll move right through to an MS.