College as an old man sucks
18I’m a bit grey in the temples and have 3 beautiful children. I’m going back to college for my MBA and today I had a final. Back when I did undergrad, there was no such thing as on-line class. Now, all my classes are online and I have to download some wacky bullcrap malware laden browser just to take my final. I can’t use excel for my accounting final but have to use something that would make clippy weap tears of sadness. Oh, you’re trying to format this as money? Well good fucking luck because this crap that was coded by a 19 yr old 5 years ago can’t seem to do that. Oh, you’re also going to get 15 significant digits and you’re going to like it.
I swear if this professor gives any grief over formatting I’m going straight to the dean because this worthless piece of crap software didn’t even have spell check! At least I’m done. Hopefully I got an A on that dumb accounting final and I can move onto the next one starting Monday.
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You sure they were 19 five years ago? Might be the same coders who did the course management system I had to use back in 2006 before I retired from college teaching. And I think that was about the third different one we had to use during a 5-year period, back when those software companies were swallowing each other or suing their competitors into oblivion. (Blackboard, eCampus, Angel, ?; seems like I’m forgetting one we had.)
Good luck on the finals! (Shouldn’t take luck, is what I always told my students.)
RIP, Clippy. MS must have a large graveyard somewhere between heaven and hell.
Meh. Microsoft copilot is probably coming for you.
We had blackboard
Honestly I thought college was a total waste of money/time for where I ended up. Coding is basic logic. We knew how to do that in highschool learning basic C in 2003.
Then I spent a lot of time in college in 2004-2008 where the intro ECE course which is supposed to be “hard” was an easy A. But I over stretched working to pay for college, doing NROTC, etc. And it was easy to skip the totally redundant early classes. When I’d never missed a day in highschool And half way though I realized ECET was a thing and what I really loved was applying/building. Not physics for chip design. Wasted time there. Plus watching people cheat.
Still mucked that up a little. Reality is I could have done/learned the job I got hired for in 2010 straight out of highschool with the same results but they would have never hired/promoted without a degree. At least then college was “cheap” .
A college degree means nothing to me
Good on you for going back to school!
We had someone out who’s picking my husband’s brain for what he makes (they want to make it, too, but on a larger scale).
I’m in charge of IT. Yeah, okay, youngun here’s what I’m gonna do. I’ll make a password-protected directory on our website, send you the login and password, FTP the files into it (oh, and here’s the FTP info for you, as well), and knock yourself out.
Shew…I’m almost 70 years old, a cloud is something in the sky.
And my husband, whose middle name is Luddite, is getting emails from that company with Excel and Word, and PDFs…which are completely out of his domain (thank goodness, not out of mine).
I’m amazed at your perseverance. You have my utmost admiration.
There is no corporate money to be made in software, the real money is made in tech support. If your software is so reliable it doesn’t break and so user friendly no one needs help, that’s a bad thing. Enterprise software is the worst.
And college, except for a few carefully selected majors, has priced itself out of the market. This is largely due to the student loan industry, which creates a level of financial disconnect from the true cost.
Follow the money.
@2many2no I spent the last 10 years leading several software projects at my company. I guess what I was getting at was I’d be embarrassed if one of my teams presented what was shown to me as anything other than a proof of concept.
@2many2no Part of the increasing cost of college has to do with the colleges competing for students (don’t know why a good college would have to…)
Now they have to offer great football teams and other athletics and new facilities for the athletes, fancy student centers, cafes on every corner, the best rock wall to climb, …
Look at even the public colleges and watch their recruiting videos! (A few of them actually mention the quality of their faculty. Those Nobel laureates cost a lot of money, and most never teach more than a single class during a semester [think they do any grading?], though very few actually teach a class any undergraduate would take.)
Even the community college I retired from got into the Marketing of the brand.
Pie in the sky marketing?
@2many2no @phendrick IDK. Maybe. I wouldn’t pay attention to any of that. Purdue was an in-state top 10 engineering school. I was in-state. Pell grants. Paid a bit. I didn’t take much in loans but a few. They were only 6.5% and mostly to fund living off campus. Which was cheaper back then than dorms cause there were three of us. I worked.
Purdue instate tuition in 2004 was like $5500. I think it’s now 10K. It’s been 20 years. But yeah out of state is 30K. It was 20K.
Maybe that’s just an Indiana thing? Idk state schools should be cheaper. I wouldn’t have paid 20K a semester to go to Purdue despite it’s reputation. That’s a lot of loans
My engagement with football was
A. Being annoyed walking into campus from the football parking lot.
B. Working security at the gates/in stadium
C. Directing traffic for games.
D. Being annoyed at the traffic jams/stupid people
E. Walking patrols and calling in weird stuff to dispatch. Like… “Hey there are three guys half carrying a drunk chick away from the whole tailgating side of things… Um can we get an officer to check on her”
But sportsball is just not my deal
I got my MBA 100% online almost 20 years after my undergrad. Loved it. I never had to use the lockdown browser thing. Couple of frustrating collaboration apps and digital book things, but way better than physically going to a classroom.
I waited until I was almost 40 to go back and get my B.S. Having given many kids the advice to choose a 4.0 major for their bachelor’s, and specialize into what they really liked later if and only if going to grad school, did I follow my own advice? Oh, HELL, no. So I came out with a BS in CompSci just in time for the desktop revolution to put scads of 20-year people on the street as big outfits ditched their mainframes. I only ever got one year of employment from my degree. I had to fall back on selling auto parts and printing T-shirts.
@werehatrack
I consider myself pretty darn lucky in life. I went to school for Information Systems and a tiny bit of Finance to work in the banking industry. I got a job for a company working on very specific banking software in May of 2008.
Any guesses to what happened to the banking industry in August of 2008? Anyway, I managed to keep my job but suffered through 5 years of pay freezes before I decided enough is enough and jumped ship to the software development side of a retail company. I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life managing various projects here and like it… but it’s not what I want to do for the rest of my life. I look at the CIO type roles I’d aspire to be in and notice they all have MBA’s in their titles so I figure that’s probably a direction I should go.
@werehatrack
But now you can give very good advice to mehtizens on these. And free! (sorry about that)
Thank you!
BTW, Meh is a good place for younger people to come to to get their BS.
@show_the_maw @werehatrack
Good luck. Would probably be worth the trials and tribulations to do it, if you are in a suitable position for such.
An online university with a good business school might be very doable for you. To make sure this education would be to your liking, You could go online to such, search their online catalog, see what the courses are, and get a list of appropriate textbooks from their bookstore. MANY TEXTBOOKS are available for free download, if you do suitable searching! If not the current textbook, many a recent older addition can be found. (Usually methods and techniques don’t change often, just the problem sets, so they can sell new books – book publishers make little to no money on used book sales). Of course, you could order a new book at $200 - $300 a pop.
Be sure you like that kind of stuff though before going all in for it.
EDIT:
OOPS. Just reread your initial post and see you HAVE started back. Disregard above.
@show_the_maw Without an MBA in many industries and companies you will top out. If you want to become part of the top management team make sure you take enough finance and economics regardless of your field.
@Kidsandliz yeah, my concentration is in technology but all my electives are economics and supply chain based. In what I want to do it’s hard to look up and not see an MBA looking down on me so I guess if I want to look left and right I needed to take the 3 years and join the club.
@show_the_maw When you join the club be sure to go beyond the minimum in finance. It use to be, in general in larger companies, that the way to the top was operations. Now it is via finance. What tops out many women (besides lack of mentoring) is lack of enough finance and econ. Unlike women, men tend to get advised to take more but lack of the right kind of mentoring can still be a road block. People tend to top out in the middle of mid management without enough knowledge in those areas. Unless you want to stay at your company (and if they pay for it you likely will have to sign at least a 2 year post MBA contract) you want to go to the best MBA program you can get into in the general, larger region of the country you want to work. The recruiters that come to them are offering better jobs (typically) than the ones lower down the food chain. Studying for the G-MAT makes sense as it is a test full of trick questions that cover limited universe of information (at one point in time I was teaching review classes for Kaplan).
Depending on your level at your company, and age, an executive MBA might be the way to go, but this is way more expensive. This degree presumes you are working full time so often is in residence every other weekend only so it might be a good route (and also usually used by people staying at that company who are blocked from promotions due to not having an MBA)
If you end up taking your MBA online (and it is wise to work at least 2 years between the undergrad and MBA as the salary tick post MBA is higher when you do that) look at state or non-profit MBA’s that are ranked as top online programs. So many online degrees are discounted as being “fluff” and many of them are. Not so long ago I wrote (I am an adjunct there) the class shell for a beginning masters stats class (business analytics) and was shocked to discover I was only supposed to cover through descriptive statistics rather than though regression (single variable, not multivariable) which is the normal grad level stats class content. I’d never hire a grad from that college as any class I have taught there is watered down (we have no control over that as we are forced to use a pre-written class shell and have zero degrees of freedom). Big time.
Still working at 76 and just got new postage meter on a 4 year lease so that means I have to get to 80. Was awful student from 1st grade on. Not sure how I even got through college much a less law school, but the thought of taking an type of course for fun at my age makes me physically ill. I can barely tolerate the home study continuing ed courses I have to take every two years to retain my CPA license.
@Felton10 Think of it as brain exercising, to stave off the inevitable atrophying!
I’m close to your age.
I dread that happening to me, for I have witnessed how hard it is to regain physical abilities that have been neglected for a while. When younger, I worked on curling 45 or 50 pounds with either arm. Now carrying in a 35 pound bag of dog food with both arms from my truck to my pantry is a chore.
I am working my way through two textbooks currently, one on math I have gotten very rusty on, and one on programming in a language new to me. And everyday I do at least two crossword puzzles and some other brain games (Wordle, Guess My Word, KenKen online and Backgammon online).
I’m still generally good at all these, and want to keep it that way.
Be a lifetime learner, or park in a recliner (or decliner, as I have heard them called).
@phendrick People keep asking me how long I am going to keep working. I guess as long as I am able and my clients will have me. Most of my clients are in the DC, VA and MD area where I hail from and except for the usual attrition, most have remained with me during the 20 years I have been in FL. So either I am cheap, a good CPA or a combination of both. The extra money never hurts and I am more convinced than ever that the stimulation of doing this type of work has kept my brain from deteriorating.
@Felton10 Keep on keepin’ on.
If it’s good enough for Martha Stewart:
https://people.com/food/martha-stewart-says-theres-no-reason-to-retire-exclusive/
The online stuff is very problematic - especially the shortened semester courses. Less content which is dumbed down with low expectations (eg faculty are pressured to pass nearly everyone)… Many of those classes are put together by adjuncts and often those only have for profit degrees. The for profit degrees are inferior, if you can pay we will admit you… There are very few actual good online only programs out there.
@Kidsandliz I’m going through University of Nebraska. We may not football good but education wise it’s OK. I’m just choosing online classes because I work 40 hrs and have 3 kids I need to help with homework, feed, bathe, and get to bed every night. Online means I can still do all that and then do homework from 10-midnight every day after my other chores are done.
Congrats on going back and go to the Dean just to tell him how much it sucked. lol