Personal prosperity: It's a matter of degrees

In my days as an experienced business dean, often considering subsequent administrative appointments, I developed the habit of describing my academic career in 'arcs,' like a guest star appearing over a sequence of episodes in a television series, to describe the phases of my career.

Using abroad brush I could quite vividly summarize those fifty years in higher education with a seres of arcs, each lasting abouvneight to ten years, and coming close to paralleling the decades from 1969 to 2019.

The first and perhaps most distinctive arc was the nine years of university education that led to earning my Ph. D. in 1978. If I think of my high school graduation in June 1969 as the 'spark to the first arc,' it is a matter of earning four academic degrees in less than ten years, with the B.S. in Administrative Science (May 1973) and my MBA (May 1975) falling between those bookend degrees.

I have those diplomas. I used to remind my student advisees that an employer will likely never ask to see your diploma. A transcript, yes, but usually only after the hire, to confirm the story you spun during the interview. Instead, your resume would be of more interest to the employer and of value to you in your career. That said, it was always comforting to post my three college diplomas in my faculty office, less to impress the person visiting my office and more to offer me some confirmation of my achievements during a quiet moment in the office, when I could often ask myself, "Is this real?" While I may have had some idea about an academic career as early as during my undergraduate days, any path I had in mind never materialized. My post-undergraduate education and faculty appointments were more a matter of circumstance, good fortune, or a quirk of fate than any strategic management of a 'career.'

Here's one example: After a few years as an assistant professor at the University of Kansas, I seriously contemplated pivoting, thought a lot about going back to school, e.g., MIT, to earn a credential with a more technical component, e.g., MIS, back before people used a term such as 'STEM' to describe this area of study, and well before PCs, MicroSoft, and Macs. Note: I do recall a student of mine who left school early, a campus employee working in the Computer Center (housing the massive IBM mainframe) to take a job as a very early employee of, yes, MicroSoft.

I did not leave academe, although I did interview with InterFirst Bank in Dallas and Payless Shoe in Topeka, for possible jobs in organizational development in their HR departments. And I did consider moving to Kansas City, escaping the college town social life that grew more difficult for a single professor after the age of thirty.

Instead, I grabbed a succession of surprise opportunities. The first was the undergraduate director position at Kansas, in just my third year at KU. I served the 198081 academic year but realized that it would be a significant barrier to tenure were I to remain, so I resigned less than a year after I took the position. But it was a good learning experience and credentialed me a bit for subsequent administrative searches. What followed was a quick succession of opportunities, first at Wyoming (1982-83), then the University of North Carolina (fall 1986), and then Marquette (spring 1987).

These moves were more looking for something, anything better rather than any careful plan, but the accumulation of experiences and contacts served me for the subsequent, larger steps, to Central Arkansas (1992) and then Loyola (1995).