You definitely need to do some research on the MFA theatre job market (or lack thereof) to make sure the payoff is there.
My BIL has a PhD in theoretical mathematics and is having a hard time finding a job. Part of the problem is the huge gap between reality and his expectations - he genuinely believed he could have his pick of high-paying, strictly 9-5, low-stress jobs.
He’s becoming very bitter that potential employers don’t value the PhD he spent 6 years working for. I do feel for him, but nobody owes him a living at the salary he feels he’s entitled to. It strikes me as somewhat outdated to believe that higher education should automatically translate to a higher salary, like the Pit thread where someone’s mother thought that a bachelor’s degree meant you would always be able to find work.
As the waste-your-degree poster child I’m definitely not against learning for the sake of learning. But I think if you want X salary after you graduate it’s in your interest to do some research first.
At one management consulting firm I worked at, one of my coworkers had a masters or Phd in aerospace engineering. Whenever the project manager was like “guys come on! This isn’t rocket science!” I would lean over and be like “is that true?”
I don’t post too much as you guys are generally too fast and too good with your posting, but I thought I should post in this thread
I have a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from a school that is in the top 20 on that chart, plus 8-10 years (depending on how you count) working as an engineer for Boeing in Seattle. I haven’t been able to find a job since my graduation from MBA school in May 2007. I grant that there are some extenuating circumstances in my case, most importantly changing career paths from Engineering to Marketing and acting as Executor for a fairly complex estate which started right around graduation. But in January, I joined a temp firm that hasn’t found a remote possibility. I have been turned down volunteering for office work for non-profits that I have been associated with, and I am currently examining Craigslist for internships and volunteer jobs. Most applications give me the old pocket veto where I don’t even get a rejection.
If I could manage to get a month of experience in any area of marketing, I bet I would have job possibilities. Granted, that isn’t saying the same thing as saying ‘experience gives the same options as an MBA’ because in my case, I have an MBA, but I know organizations that have hired people with only an undergraduate level of education but who had that had one summer as a sophomore working in an ad agency. Some of them have said they feel that I am overqualified for the job in question, but they rarely have appropriate level jobs for my skill level. The only other jobs they post are CMO, VP of marketing, Director of Marketing kind of jobs and I am just changing into marketing. C level jobs are not yet appropriate for me.
Or, more importantly, graduating into the worst job market since the great depression.
The problem is in a bad job market, companies tend to only look for experienced strategic hires. People who can hit the ground running and fill a specific position they need at that time. During better times, they will typically hire a lot more juior people with the expectation that there will be some turnover during the year.
I had lucked out when I graduated from business school in 2001. I caught the last new hire class of a prestigeous consulting firm in Manhattan right before the dot com collapse / Enron / Arthur Andersen / 9-11 shitfest. And most of the year and a half I spent afterwards was being part of a start class that was way too big for the current economic climate waiting to get laid off.
Well, thank you msmith537, you make me feel better about myself. When talking to employers, I mention the recent conditions when they wonder what I’ve been doing.
I should also point out that year a lot of my classmates who had offers from competing firms had their start dates push back sometimes up to a year or two (mine was only pushed back 3 months) or recinded altogether.
My MS in IS/Operational Management has qualified me to jump to the top of the salary range in my field (which is a cross between technical writing and instructional designer) here in NC. I was offered my current job because I was the only applicant with a Masters who made the final pool of candidates. My manager told me they felt my degree added “prestige” to the position.
However, as salaries in NC tend to cap out fairly low, I’m now stuck. My hiring salary was the max salary that my job band pays, and there’s no way for me to move up a band without doing something entirely different elsewhere in the company.
Well…that is something! You started out high.
For many people that are not in the main business/executive/senior management chain this is the normal state of affairs. I am in the same boat right now and I can point to many others as well.
If you want to ‘move up’ from here you need to get as much experience as you can and move to a larger company that needs people doing what you do but on a larger/more complicated scale.
In Mechanical Engineering, my Masters is considered the “terminal” degree, unless one is going into academia. My company for example pays exactly the same starting salary for an MS-ME as a PhD. An MS-ME is worth about 10% more starting salary, or about $5,000 to $6,000 more per year, than a BS-ME. It also gets you hired in at one level higher than a raw recruit, which in effect puts you 1-3 years ahead on the corporate ladder. Past the first few years, however, the MS-ME has no real effect at my company on promotions, positions, or additional salary.
Probably most people don’t care about it, but some of the PEs I know are really concerned over a serious proposal to mandate a Master’s degree to get the PE license (thus allowing you to legally be an Engineer with State seal and everything). Old people like me who already have the license will be exempted of course (and I already have my Master’s degree), but we’re worried that it might make it really hard to get new graduates, since most all of our Engineering jobs mandate that you eventually get your license. In effect, given that almost all of our applicants with a Master’s degree are from outside the US, unless Engineering schools start sending out a lot more students our way, it’s going to either cause severe salary inflation, or else require large numbers of H1B visas.
QFT: I’m in defense electronics, and the people with a strong inner drive and curiosity will have spent their time (and continue to spend it) figuring out how to figure out things. IME someone with an advanced degree wherein they had to produce an Actual Thing™ will have just a bit more knowledge, familiarity and confidence. Of course, people can develop and demonstrate those traits on the job starting with a BS and get to the same place, sometimes in a shorter amount of time than if they went for an advanced degree.
As you imply (or maybe I’m just reading into it), you don’t get paid to be smart; you get paid to get things done, and however you go about developing your analytical and communications skills, the goal is to be more useful, and your demonstrated usefulness will have a tendency to increase your chances of success, however you want to define “success.”
I think I love you. This is something I definitely would have done if I were in the same position, at least once.
Anyway, back to the topic: I just got my MLIS and am in the middle of applying to jobs during a nationwide public librarian layoff shitstorm. I’ve got some prospects of getting an MLIS required job (I’m currently a paraprofessional, and my county is in the midst of layoffs that will more likely than not cut my position), but the competition is a lot tougher than it was even six months ago. Nonetheless, the major trade-off between not having a Master’s in my area and having one is being able to move up the chain into management in the public library; this, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon to have the MLIS as a job requirement for advancement. Most of the library managers that I know in the public realm do not have an MLIS or have plans to get one, and have managed to get where they’re at simply by having been a good employee and showing that they’re cut out for management during a time period where none of the positions required an MLIS. Though librarianship doesn’t pay well until/unless you get into management positions in the public sector, the supposed idea behind getting the advanced degree is more about being interested in the work and advancing in the field rather than going for a bigger paycheck. I’m looking for a living wage at this point and the opportunity to move into management in the long run, and this is a reasonable expectation/goal for my education.
My current challenges as a new graduate is proving to those hiring that “X years post-MLIS required” is not necessarily going to scare me off as long as X < 4; I didn’t just coast through school and have a handful of projects under my belt that have better prepared me for library/research work in the public and academic sectors than my classmates who either slacked or didn’t have time to take on major project-oriented classes. I may not be a master cataloger, but I can hone what abilities I have gained as I go along and learn new skills. A good portion of the students I was with could be split into two categories: those who needed to learn the profession from scratch and those who were jumping through the hoops in order to get to a point where they could advance in their career. I was in a little of each, having come from an Anthropology/Museum Studies background with only special library experience when I got into grad school. Schooling is what you make of it, and it’s just as important to make contacts, network and gain experience during school as it is to get good grades-- many fields these days are more about who you know and who can vouch that you’re a good worker when it comes to getting hired.
IME it’s pretty well accepted that a Master’s of Ed. is not really very difficult or even instructive.
I’ve been in so many teacher meetings in which people bemoaned their station in the workforce and pay. I’m unmoved. It’s a long way from working in the mines, and you get 2.5 months off, plus various vacations in the middle. If you want to work summer school, there’s a pretty easy $4k in pocket additionally.