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Jon the Pervert got his name after I found out that for the 6 months that we were together he had been trawling for sex on Craigslist.  Something to the tune of “I have seats in such-and-such section for the playoffs.  I want a girl with DD breasts to go with me.  Send pictures.”  You can’t make shit like this up.  It’s no wonder his lab work wasn’t going anywhere.

One thing that absolutely drove me crazy was that Jon the Pervert was always talking about money.  Money he spent on rent, money he could save by moving somewhere else, his graduate student stipend, money he paid for a bottle of wine, money he was expecting from a tax refund.  Money money money.  We were students, living on $1500/month stipend, more than half of which went to rent.  I was also constantly stressed about money.  It was poverty-level, but doable.  It meant that I didn’t go out to eat often.  It meant that I didn’t spend my spare time shopping.  It meant that I didn’t go on vacation or travel.  But whenever Jon the Pervert would talk about money, I never knew what to say.  It felt so awkward.   

Jon the Pervert and I parted ways shortly before graduation.  He kept trawling Craigslist for sex and I got a real job.  And eventually came to enjoy having a real salary, eating out most of the week, setting off on a frivolous weekend trip, never thinking twice about a shoe purchase.

Now that I’m about to pay a 30K EUR tuition installment, I’m once again feeling the stress of being a broke-ass student.  While I could just rack up the loans, I’m nervous about not being able to pay them back.  Just like in grad school, the prospect of looking for a job in a recession is daunting.  There are July 08 grads still looking for jobs!  

I did lots of frustrated window shopping this weekend.  Sometimes there’s an entire season where I just hate all the styles.  Last fall had very little to offer and I was happy to shop for home decor at Scandinavian design stores.  To my chagrin, this season, I am drooling over all the t-strap shoes, the short jackets with balloon sleeves, the skinny belts, the jersey dresses a la Dior.  [Sigh]

Not talking about money with INSEAD students has proven difficult.  There’s visa fees totalling 200 USD, there’s housing deposits of one months rent, there’s the business foundations at 1500 EUR course (that Columbia offers for free), there’s 200+ EUR fee to take the test to prove you can habla Español or spreche Deutsch or govorit’ po Russki, and 500 EUR per term of language tuition should your Español not be convincing enough.  It’s quite easy to join in the collective bitching and moaning about the fleecing.  And there’s something of a bonding exercise to it.  Maybe Jon the Pervert was just trying to bond with me over the shared stress of being near-broke.  And being brought up not to talk about money I didn’t give him the satisfaction, so he turned to Craigslist.  Maybe he wasn’t looking for DD breasts, but for someone who would hear him out about his finances.

Maybe instead of the ropes course and trust falls and egg drops during orientation, we can all just sit in a room and talk about who got what interest rate or who made the mistake of converting money to Euro too early.

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I’ll tell you that I’m desperately craving pumpkin roll and apple cider, that I bought a sweater instead of shoes this afternoon, and that I’m scared to death I might not ace my finance and statistics courses. I need to express that I’m incredibly excited about the next few days and my packed social calendar, even though I have no idea how I’m going to find time to shower between now and Friday. I want to tell you I’m nervous about meeting The Parents of The Boy when we travel to Pittsburgh this weekend.

I want to tell you I’m finding it hard to balance. That every time I take a breath I think about the other 10 things I should be doing. I want you to know how much joy and guilt this whole blogging thing brings me. Joy because I love it and guilt because I have a writing sample in my inbox I should have looked at weeks ago and my own writing sample strewn about my bedroom floor. I want to inform you that I’m 97% sure I’ll be living in Virginia over the summer and I’m 100% sure I’m going to the 20something meet up.

I want…I want new sneakers and more gym shorts. I want 5 hours of sleep to feel like 8. I want banana bread and pumpkin cookies and broccoli cheese soup. I want to finish the book on my nightstand and the poem in my head. I want to not question the happiness of my parents, or ever hear them threaten divorce in attempts to correct my brother’s behavior. I want a cut, color and wax at my salon and a guaranteed parking spot on campus. I want my deadlines to be pushed backward instead of forward and a day where nothing is “rushed.”  I want to be adequately compensated for the work I do at Small Town Hospital, a Game Genie for the hard stuff in life, and a personal assistant to run my errands.
I want my closet to organize and update itself to represent this season’s fashions. I want to stop envisioning my disaster plans for when my parents pass away. I want my mom to sleep more and find sometime to take care of herself instead of everyone else. I want my dad to drink a little less and stop reminding me that he’s the age his dad was when he died. I want to color in my Disney princess coloring book, watch an episode of Pete and Pete and pretend 3rd grade handwriting class is still my biggest worry.

I want to stop focusing on the negative and reflect on the positive. I want to go to yoga and meditate and drink some damn green tea. I want someone else to do all the crappy administrative work involved in applying to grad school. I want a Jack Vettriano on my wall and Louboutin on my feet. I want a separate closet for my shoes and satin sheets. I want work to be canceled due to beautiful weather or someone to pay me to blog and watch marathons of House. I want rainbows and faeries and good hair days for all*.

What do you want?

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While I was there, I married the love of my life and we had our first son.  We moved back to our hometown to get better jobs and cheaper housing.  To continue school, I began attending the University of Saint Francis which had a weekend college program.  I worked full time to support my family, so I went to school on the weekends.  I finished my Bachelor’s degree in Management after 9 years of working and going to school. 

I decided that I wanted to get a Master’s degree while I was working my way through my undergrad degree.  I saw the people around me in the workplace who had no credibility academically.  I wanted to be better than that, so when I was finished with my undergrad degree I jumped right into grad school at the Fort Wayne campus of Indiana University.

For those of you not familiar with Fort Wayne, Indiana, there are only a couple of choices for colleges in town.  There are a couple of “traditional” programs (i.e. 2 year programs with 16 week semesters) and there are a couple of non-traditional programs (i.e. 5 week semesters wtih classes only meeting once a week).  Now understand, there are no Harvards here in Fort Wayne.  I understand that and I accept it.  But out of the schools available, only one of them is recognized as having any kind of quality–IU Fort Wayne.

Here is the rub, though: the school isn’t exactly Yale.  It is accredited by the body that accredits business schools, but it is overshadowed by IU Bloomington’s Kelly School of Business.  What happens locally, then, is that all of the programs get lumped together as being basically the same.  At the risk of sounding like a snob, it really isn’t true.  How can a program that has 16 week semesters and is taught by PhD’s be the same as a program that has 5 total classes and is mostly taught by people who aren’t professional educators?

Most employers around here don’t make any sort of distinction between any of the programs.  There is Harvard Business School, then there is ever other program.  They don’t seem to care.  So I ask myself, why did I put myself through the harder program if the end result is the same?  Where does a good school that isn’t necessarily nationally known fit in?

Does anyone else run into these issues?  How did you handle it? 

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• enrollment in the University of Chicago’s “Master of Arts degree in social sciences has quadrupled since 1989, jumping to 160 from 40, and despite a tuition price tag of $37,000″
• to the head of the Cal State system master’s degrees are the “coin of the realm”
• the for-profit University of Phoenix gave out 24,788 MAs last year – or one thousand more than the number of BAs it awarded.

Is it really so great to get that second degree?  It depends on who you are.  The Times proffers some uninspiring anecdotes about students who got better jobs with their MAs.  But no matter how these matriculants do, the tuition they pay sure is sweet for universities, who can add MA students to their extant grad school classes, turning said classes into paying propositions without much institutional outlay.  As a Chicago administrator notes, “it is beneficial for the university because there is a lot of tuition income to be had.”

Ahh, tuition dollars, the milk and honey of academia.  Maybe Michigan can use its masters degree lucre to invest in a football team capable of scoring touchdowns against Division I opposition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/education/12masters.html

The number of students in the University of Chicago program that bestows a Master of Arts degree in social sciences has quadrupled since 1989, jumping to 160 from 40, and despite a tuition price tag of $37,000, every year more students clamor for admittance.

“It’s an expensive degree, but students have calculated how fast they get their investment back,” said John J. MacAloon, an associate dean at the University of Chicago and director of the program. “And it is beneficial for the university because there is a lot of tuition income to be had.”

More students than ever have started master’s programs this fall, and universities are seeing those programs as potentially lucrative sources of revenue. The number of students earning these degrees around the country has nearly doubled since 1980. Since 1970, the growth is 150 percent, more than twice as fast as bachelor and doctorate programs.

“Master’s programs are the most obvious targets of opportunity,” said George L. Mehaffy, a vice president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. “The degrees are in high demand, and this is an optimal time to enter or expand the market.”

For students, the degrees are often expensive; at private universities, many students take out $50,000 in loans for every year of school. And scholarships and fellowships are rare, unlike doctoral programs, which are usually fully financed by universities.

Still, many say the price is worth it. In his two-year master’s program in science technology and environmental policy from the University of Minnesota Craig Nelson had $35,000 in loans. Now, he works in regulatory affairs at the 3M Company.

“Without the degree, I wouldn’t have the job,” he said. “So even though I’ll be paying the loan for 10 years, it was a good move for me.”

Getting into the business of offering these degrees can be a good move for universities, too, with some that have traditionally focused only on undergraduate students now entering the master’s market. The California State University system, for example, has introduced many new applied master’s degrees and is expanding its master’s of business administration programs.

“We are really conscious of the fact that master’s degrees are becoming the coin of the realm,” said Gary W. Reichard, the executive vice chancellor and chief academic officer for the California system. “And because M.B.A.’s can offer tremendous salary boosts down the road, we can charge higher tuitions to students.”

Universities also do not have to provide dormitory rooms and dining halls for master’s candidates, because graduate students typically do not live on campus.

Some university officials say the explosion of these programs has less to do with revenue than it does with the marketplace pressures on students to get higher degrees and credentials.

Thomas Ehrlich, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a former president of Indiana University, said that although many master’s programs could be good revenue streams for universities, “We’re not in the business of making money.” He added, “We’re in the business of educating students.”

But some schools are in the business of both. The University of Phoenix, a commercial institution with 60 branch campuses and around 200,000 students, awarded 24,788 master’s degrees last year, mostly for work completed online in business and education. That was at least a thousand more than the number of bachelor’s degrees it awarded.

Many university provosts say a graduate education can be more expensive to provide than an undergraduate degree, merely because class sizes are usually smaller in graduate courses. But for universities that already have established doctoral programs, adding paying master’s students to the mix means they get a bump in tuition dollars without a heavy outlay of resources.

“Sometimes there is unused capacity in graduate classrooms,” Mr. Mehaffy said. “If there are 10 people in a graduate course one year and 15 the next, there is a 50 percent growth but no real drain on the institution.”

Universities are also luring master’s students into staying for multiple years by offering dual-degree programs: two master’s degrees at twice the cost. Some programs join international affairs and journalism, science and public policy, business and education. Other schools extend programs; for example, the University of Wisconsin’s two-year master’s degree in anthropology can be lengthened to three years if students want to add a museum studies concentration.

And many students believe that these multiple degrees are highly valuable in today’s competitive job market.

Rey A. Phillips Santos has three graduate degrees gracing his résumé: two master’s and one in law. After completing the master’s of arts program in the social sciences from the University of Chicago, he decided to go on to the Chicago-Kent College of Law, in a joint-degree program in environmental management with the Stuart Graduate School of Business.

“There is a huge demand for credentials in high-level jobs now,” said Mr. Phillips, who is a lawyer for the Chicago city government. “Each of my degrees helped me to get a leg up in the job market, and earn higher salaries than I would have otherwise. They were great investments.”

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Short Term (Fall Semester, NOW):
GMATs are my highest priority in terms of grad school right now. I need to clear 700 to make myself really competitive, which will take some polish and elbow grease. I’m in a good position now, but for what I want I need to get higher. My school’s not the most prestigious place out there, and I’ve only got around 2 years of work experience at internships and the like. It’s an uphill battle to be sure.

I should also look at talking to people who’ve gone through the admissions process at some of my targetted schools, particularly to root out tips on what I should and shouldn’t do.

Medium Term (Spring Break / Spring Semester):
Networking’s important. I need to add a “face” to my resume by visiting some of the schools I’m interested in, if only to touch base for a moment and look at campus life. Stanford, Haas, and the Jesuit schools around here are pretty easy to get to, so I should focus my efforts on the east coast campuses which are harder to travel to (Stern, Sloan, Harvard GSB, BC, Columbia). I should also solidify my choices around fall.

Long Term (Next Fall)
Apply and cross fingers and toes. I plan on taking a year break from school to work (which helps out my application), so doing this next fall means I’ll be rotated in during the following year’s fall deadline. This means that I get winter, spring, and the summer to work full-time and contribute to my resume.

Preliminary List:
West Coast:

• Santa Clara University (decently selective, close, part-time)
• Stanford GSB (absurdly selective, close, full-time)
• UCB Haas (absurdly selective, close, part/full)
• USF GSB (decently selective, close, part-time)
• UCLA GSB (very selective, regional, full-time)
• UC Davis GSB (decently selective, close, part-time)
• University of Washington GSB (very selective, regional, full-time)
• University of Portland GSB (decently selective, regional, full-time)

East Coast:

• MIT Sloan (absurdly selective, Boston, full-time)
• Harvard GSB (absurdly selective, Boston, full-time)
• NYU Stern (very selective, NY, full-time)
• Columbia GSB (decently selective, NY, full-time)
• Boston College GSB (decently selective, Boston, full-time)

Middle:

• University of Chicago GSB (very selective, Chicago, full-time)

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Would I still be as entrepreneurial?  Would I have worked for startups and known that I wanted my own company?  Would I be in South Africa right now working at a new Venture Capital Firm?

It is always interesting to me that the Stanford “prestige-factor” (or brand recognition) is not even close to Harvard’s in South Africa.  From what I can find, there are less than 20 Stanford MBA’s currently working in South Africa, but that is the downside of a smaller, more personalized B-school!

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Would I still be as entrepreneurial?  Would I have worked for startups and known that I wanted my own company?  Would I be in South Africa right now working at a new Venture Capital Firm?

It is always interesting to me that the Stanford “prestige-factor” (or brand recognition) is not even close to Harvard’s in South Africa.  From what I can find, there are less than 20 Stanford MBA’s currently working in South Africa, but that is the downside of a smaller, more personalized B-school!

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