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"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

Tag: Mid-career

Mid-career Masters Degree: El Paso, Texas

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On Wednesday, October 16, 2013

In Education, Work

Day 786 of 1000

This is the fourth 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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After ten years in industry, there were lots of good reasons for me to return to college at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) for a Masters Degree.  Primarily, there was a professor there who wanted me to come for a specific reason.  He was not just willing to have me come.  There was a need for someone like me.  That was huge.  I had something to offer the Industrial Engineering program at UTEP because of my ten years of experience that other students who moved directly from their Bachelors degree did not.  I was able to talk to people in the industrial sector around Texas and New Mexico as well as the Maquiladora sector in Ciudad Juarez, and Chihuahua in Mexico.  Those ten years experience that to speak with the industrial base in ways that “fresh-outs” could not.

It turns out that our program was further reaching than even the industrial sector around El Paso.  We ended up providing services and/or installing equipment in Israel, Singapore, and Monterrey, Mexico.  Those services brought money and research opportunities to the University.  The experience I gained representing UTEP in industry was, in some ways, more valuable than the classes I took.  The bigger point is that anyone with ten years experience in the private sector, if they were working hard and paying attention, will have something significant to offer a University that will make the transition back to college much more palatable.

While UTEP is not one of the flagship universities of Texas like Texas A&M or University of Texas at Austin, it is a great regional university.  It had exactly what I needed and it was not only willing to accept me as a student, but had a unique way to use my skills.  When I first got there, I wondered whether I had made a big mistake, but the longer I stayed, the more I liked it.  It was a super match for me and we actually were successful enough in our work that, when I finished my Masters degree, I was invited to Texas A&M to continue on to a PhD.  I never availed myself of that opportunity, but UTEP allowed me to transition from a mediocre (in terms of grades) Bachelors degree to a top tier University in one step.

The bigger point is that finding a slot like this might take some serious investigation and a move to what might at first seem to be an odd place, but it is worth it to find a school that will not only accept you as a student, but has a professor with a desire for someone with your unique skills.  The professor with a desire for your unique skills and a willingness to go to bat for you makes all the difference in the world both with respect to acceptance into a program and life as a student once you get there.

Mid-career Masters Degree: Getting started again after a pretty lousy start at community college

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On Saturday, September 28, 2013

In Education

Day 768 of 1000

This is the third 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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I have good friend named Troy who made one of the most bold mid-career moves I have ever seen.  He spent the better part of a decade in Christian ministry.  Before that, he went to a local community college up in Ohio.  His grades were not so hot because his heart was not really in it.  At around age 30 he left the ministry and needed a way to make a living.  He had done a pretty big water project during his time in the ministry that he really enjoyed so he thought he might take a stab at a degree in Construction Engineering Management (CEM).  He decided to move down to our part of the world, work for awhile to be a resident so he could get in-state tuition, and then go back to college.

About that time, our family met him at church and we struck up a friendship.  We went out to lunch after church quite a lot and we talked about his plan.  In our discussions, he explained he was most interested in the technical aspects of water and construction projects much more than their management.  I asked him why he did not think about trying a degree in Civil Engineering rather than CEM.  He said he liked that idea, but Civil Engineering is a much harder course of study (it truly is) and he did not know if he could handle some of the math and chemistry given his current responsibilities as he was planning to get married at the time.

I suggested that after he started a family, he would not have much chance to switch careers again, so he would probably be stuck doing whatever he studied after whatever degree he got.  I also suggested that fear of a hard course in math or chemistry was no reason to give up on a career that he thought he would truly love.  Fortunately, his fiancee, who had taken a hard course of study in college through graduate school was on exactly the same page, so I was just reenforcing something she had already said.  Both of us felt (independently–I had not met her yet), that if he got really stuck, it was possible to get an inexpensive, but really good tutor for whatever material caused him problems.

GaugeCam in the tidal marsh of the North Carolina coastWith the help of his wife, he decided to go for it.  His next big problem was to convince one of the top Civil Engineering schools in the country to admit him to their program.  That was precisely my problem when I wanted to go back to college before I met Dr. Johnson.  I did not think anyone would let me into a program of any quality, especially for an engineering degree.  Troy felt the same way.  Even though he had gotten stellar grades in high school, he really was not paying attention while he was at the community college many years before and had, like me, dug himself a pretty deep hole.  Still, because of my experience at UTEP, I encouraged Troy to go talk to whoever would listen to him about getting accepted into the program on a probationary status.  I encouraged him to use the fact of his long run in Christian ministry as an indicator of his repsonsibility.  Again, you have to use examples of what you have done right to move forward.  It worked.  He was admitted on a probationary status–the same as mine when I got admitted to UTEP.  He had to pass two very difficult, technical classes to remove the probationary status.  One of the classes was the math class he feared the most.

He got a tutor for the the class he thought he might not be able to handle on his own.  He received an A i both classes.  His success helped him realize he could do it on his own.  The tutors really were a help, but the help came in the form of a confidence boost as much as an academic boost.  He was admitted on a probationary status, passed the two courses they gave him and was a full time, matriculated student in Civil Engineering in short order.  He graduated Summa Cum Laude three years after he started.

Since graduating with his Bachelors degree, Troy has moved on to a PhD in engineering.  The image that accompanies this post is of Troy’s undergraduate research project called GaugeCam.com.  It was so successful, it has continued beyond his undergraduate effort and has been taken over by faculty and additional graduate student researchers.  So far there has been one refereed journal article, with a second almost ready for publication, and several more in the works.  It pays to make bold moves.

Mid-career Masters Degree: Can you get an Engineering Masters degree with a Bachelors degree in Business?

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On Wednesday, September 25, 2013

In Education

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.

Mid-career Masters Degree: Introduction

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On Tuesday, September 24, 2013

In Education

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.

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