The Path to the Online PhD
Posted by Jennifer Buchholz on February 9th, 2009
I enrolled in the PhD program in Organization and Management at Capella University in 2000. I had been working in business/finance, but my bachelor’s degree was in communication and my master’s degree was in Human Resource Development.
One of the best parts of Capella is that all my master’s degree credits transfered in as electives, so I was required to complete only the core courses of the program to earn the degree. This certainly helped shorten the required timeframe for degree completion.
For a while, I was also working on a specialization in leadership, but I found that specialization added to the required timeframe for coursework, and in the end, I would still have a PhD, whether there was a specialization or not. So eventually, I dropped the specialization even though I had completed some of that coursework.
What I did find is that if I had an MBA rather than a MA, these PhD-level core courses would have been a lot easier to navigate. I had never taken an finance class, or a graduate-level marketing class. I found that compared to many of my classmates, I was way behind on the core business concepts. If I could go back, I don’t know if I would have done anything differently, but it is certainly something that I was aware of. I had to invest a lot more time in those courses and had to solicit help from experts in those courses to get up to speed swiftly.
I did think that my MA prepared me sufficiently for the PhD coursework. I do wish I’d have endeavored to write a Master’s Thesis, which was optional for my degree program, now that I’m working on the dissertation. That experience would serve me well at this point.
Tags: dissertation, MA, MBA, phd
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This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under My Online Program of Study, Student Voices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
