Day 764 of 1000

This is the first in a series of posts about how a mid-career Masters degree changed my life. I admire people who do an after work and weekends Masters degree so they can pay the rent and support the family, but I did not do it that way. I bailed out of my job and dived in full time after having spent ten years in the workforce.  The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here.

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Carroll Johnson, Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering, UTEPThe guy in the photo is Dr. Carroll Johnson, my thesis advisor from my Masters degree at the University of Texas at El Paso.  I would like to take credit for figuring out that it would be a good move to get a Masters degree, but the truth is that it happened for a lot of little reasons and at least two big reasons.  I like to think God had has hand in it.  The first reason that I decided to go back to school was that my company, Intelledex, got bought by a much bigger company and wanted me to move from Corvallis to Portland, Oregon.  I was really a small town boy so that did not set well with me, so I started looking around.

The second reason was the big guy in the picture.  He is everything an Industrial Engineering professor should be and even more than that, he was (and is) Texas personified–bigger than life.  If I were to write a series of posts on Dr. Johnson, I would never finish.  Maybe that is why I am writing about a mid-career Masters degree–I hope to finish the series before I die.

I first met Carroll when Intelledex sold him a vision system.  A vision system is a computer with a camera hooked up to it that does things like measure and count things, guide robots, and other stuff that is very useful to Industrial Engineers in factories.  About the time he needed a second vision system, Intelledex was in the process of being bought.  I told Carroll what was going on and he asked me whether I had ever thought about getting a Masters degree.  I told him I had, but I wanted to do something in engineering.  My undergraduate degree was in Business Administration so I did not think it was  possible to do anything in engineering.  He disabused me of that notion and we started a series of communications that culminated in me quitting my job at Intelledex and heading to Texas.

This series is about how all this took place.  I will keep an index of the posts on this page and update it as I go along.  At this writing, I am not sure how many posts it will take, but I am pretty sure it will be more than five.