This is the second 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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The title of this post in the series was a big impediment to me. I believed it was not possible to go on to a Masters degree in engineering after earning a Bachelors degree in Business Administration. I was wrong. I should have understood this because I actually worked with a lady who went on to a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering after earning a Bachelors degree in English. She had to take a ton of what Dr. Johnson called leveling classes math and science class during a probationary period, but it took her less time and effort to do that than start over from scratch on a Bachelors degree in Engineering. I have a friend who had no degree at all and made a dramatic shift from Christian ministry through a Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering, then on to a PhD in Biological and Agricultural Engineering. I will tell his story in a second post.
“Use what you have and start now” is the advice I would give anyone with a Bachelors degree and wants to get a Masters degree at just about any point in their career. What do I mean by that? I have worked and talked with a lot of people in this situation. I believe that almost everyone underestimates their preparedness for moving on to the next academic level. In my case, it took a series of conversations with Dr. Johnson to convince both that I could handle the academic load and that I was in a place to make a unique contribution to his program that would make my life at UTEP more interesting and rewarding. He was right about it all.
So the issue is to identify those things that make you desirable to a Masters degree program and present them to the right person in the school you want to attend. In the end, it is about people–you and them. I wish someone would have told me this sooner, but maybe I would not have had such a good story to tell any sooner. At any rate, I had no idea how to go about this until Dr. Johnson and I started talking. Here is a list of things we used to get me in the program. It is not long, but it was enough.
- I had taken the math and most of the science I needed in an Associate and Bachelors degree
- I spent ten years working in manufacturing facilities selling equipment and technology to solve essentially Industrial Engineering problems
- I was an experienced C programmer
- I had written technical articles in trade journals on the use of robots and vision systems in industry
In the end, we were able to set up a program that required me to take 4-5 leveling classes (Operations Research, Statistical Quality Control, and several others). Dr. Johnson started a new laboratory we called the Machine Vision Applications Laboratory. He got me a scholarship and found me a way to help him move technology into local (and eventually international) industry. After that, it was easy to make the decision to move to UTEP. My buddy, Curt and I drove down to Texas at the end of 1988.
So, first, figure out what you have and how to use it to get into the program you want. I will tell a story in the next post of a good friend who did a mid-career change that is fairly breathtaking. He thought he was starting from zero, but found a way to work his way into a truly amazing academic career that started from almost nothing and is about to end with a world class PhD.
Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 58. For some reason, I had more time to reflect on life this year than in years past. Lorena and Kelly dug through a bunch of old photos and found one from almost exactly 25 years ago and put it up on Lorena’s Facebook account. I think the picture might have gotten me into a reflective mood. My father-in-law says that, for boys, the blood does not really start getting to their brain until they are about 25. I think it was just about when this picture was taken that the blood started to get to my brain. I was 32 or 33. My buddy Curt in Tigard said it very well in a comment that went with the picture on Facebook.