Career prey selection

My second to last class at Marist is finally over. The last class won't start until the fall semester. That leaves me with several months to do something other than write inane essays. I have regained the choice of how I use my time. What will I do with it? Well, that's really a question of what I want. There are lots of ways to address this question of what I want. I've pondered this in any number of ways, but I don't think I've ever just stopped and looked at the data. What have I done in the past couple of years and what do those activities say about my desires?

Structured learning has claimed quite a bit of my time. MBA classes have taken a huge chunk of my intellectual and emotional energy. I was having an email conversation with a classmate about the program last night. He felt like the class that I just finished was the only one that he really challenged him. I get the sense that he feels cheated by the lack of rigor in the program. I don't know what he hoped to get out of the program, but I'm not so sure that he got it. I have never really stopped to think about how much I've given to this program. It was something I did on a bit of a lark. I never really considered the opportunity costs. What could I have been doing rather than doing stuff for my classes? I stopped working out at night. That's the biggest thing that I gave up to do my MBA. Have I gotten what I wanted out of the program? I think I have. I just wanted to get a better sense of what people meant when they talked about running the company. I see things much differently than I did four years ago. But that still doesn't answer the question of what my commitment to this program says about what I want to achieve in my career and life.

I viewed this whole online MBA as a bit of experiment when I started the program. Unlike my friend, who needed it to become a professional engineer, I did not have a specific reason to purse a business degree. I've found a number of ways to apply it to my career since I've been working through the program, but there is still no specific reason why I'm doing it. I feel like I got what I wanted when I could analyze Pfizer's financial statements. That's wasn't always true though. That's just my post-course rationalization. My original plan didn't even include the class where I analyzed the financial statement. I was originally going for a leadership concentration. I'm dancing around the obvious here. I wanted the degree to advance my career. I can't help but notice that my interest in the program has slipped now that my career has advanced. Was this whole MBA just a subconscious ploy to get my management to think of me as something other than a lab rat? Maybe the classes did help in shifting my focus from the lab to the business. It's hard to say as I can't relive the last four years without pursuing the degree to see what would happen.

So I guess I've spent time doing something that I hoped would benefit my career. I have ambitions to do more. That's not a huge surprise. I've never questioned that I wanted to do more. I just don't have an ultimate position in mind. I've always been oriented up the career ladder, but I don't really know where I want that ladder to end. Not having that ultimate end in mind has made planning on how to spend my time more amorphous. The MBA was good in that it keep me busy working up the career ladder without requiring me to know just what I was aiming for. Now that I have greater say over how I spend my time, I need to pick a target. I don't like to drift. I may not be much of a pursuit hunter, but I am a hunter. I just ambush rather than pursue. I can't develop the skills I'll next to capture that next opportunity if I don't know what I'm working for. I guess it's time to pick a career objective. It doesn't have to be optimal. It just needs to be something for me to focus on.