Getting a good job

From: Richard Erlacher <richard_at_idcomm.com>
Date: Fri Jun 30 16:10:46 2000

Well, I'd be sure the prospective boss has a sense of humor and doesn't have
a PhD himself. My take on what a PhD tells your prosepective employer,
though yours may, at least to some extent, be quite correct as well, is that
the holder of the PhD has on at least one occasion completed (that word
comes up a lot!) a pretty major piece of work as specified by his
supervisors, with a minimum of intervention from above, availing himself of
whatever resources were needed and producing the desired result within the
allocated time.

There are a lot of perfectly competent engineers who could not do that,
under any circumstances, and for a number of reasons, not the least of which
is that it's not directly taught in school, though you have to do some of
the necessary things in order to graduate. The first thing, of course is
to define and adequately limit the scope of the work that's chosen. The
second is to plan out the task and stick to the schedule. There are
numerous tasks that are a part of this work that have parallels in the
corporate environment.

The folks who advance the quickest are the ones who best know how to "get
the job done" even if it means doing things they don't already know how to
do. Those are the guys who've had the experience described above as the
task of getting the PhD. Having the PhD doesn't guarantee you can do it,
(personnel people frequently wish they had a guarantee) but it does show
everybody you've done it once.

I see employers today looking at a bachelor's degree as proof that you
showed up pretty consistently over a nominall 4-year period. That's a major
concern to employers nowadays. Having the bachelor's degree doesn't
guarantee you know or can do a given thing, but it is more likely in the
case of a graduate than in one who's not graduated, yet.

The same is true of a master's degree, though that's often taken to mean one
has addtional course work making him more of an expert in the discipline in
which he got the MS. Perhaps that's true, but I'm convinced it's more
assurance that the MS-holder has gotten through a fairly large piece of
work, as opposed to a bunch of small ones.

Does that sound far off what you see where you sit?

Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Ford <mikeford_at_socal.rr.com>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 1:39 PM
Subject: Re: Getting a good job


> >about going back to pick up a PhD, but each time, I could not answer the
> >question "why". With what *I* enjoy doing, having the advanced degree
would
> >merely end up as an expensive hobby/pursuit. Anyone with imagination and
> >motivation will do well regardless of their *formal* education; likewise
> >having a degree without those qualities will probably provide a higher
> >paying job but not much more.
>
> I love pointing out to employers that the primary skill of a Phd is the
> ability to stretch a simple project out to two years, and make it "seem"
> reasonable to the boss.
>
Received on Fri Jun 30 2000 - 16:10:46 BST