Getting a good job

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(a)socal.rr.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 1:39 PM Subject: Re: Getting a good job would