MIS in CJA

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by Kizmet, May 17, 2017.

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  1. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    Without even searching, criminal justice faculty. Also, my comment wasn't specific to CJ.
     
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  2. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    It is pretty common to utilize a master's degree to get your foot in the door in several fields. For me, personally, I am wanting a specialized master's to teach at the college level in a specific subject. I also want to open other doors.
     
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  3. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    OK then, please provide one example as I just asked for. So far I have two posts in response telling me that you need a Masters to teach at the college level. I know.

    What I asked for was an example of an entry level position that requires a masters degree and zero experience (hence, getting your foot in the door) excluding instances where a Masters degree is the minimum credential for that occupation (i.e. teaching in a college, being an acupuncturist etc).

    While many people, indeed, try to make a career pivot by earning a masters degree my point is that this is often not the best way or even a remotely reliable way.

    So you're working in a call center selling widgets but you dream of working in the criminal justice field. You don't even have a specific desire. You just want to do something vaguely CJey. You go back to earn a Masters and now you have this beautiful credential. Now what? Nothing, most likely. Because having no CJ experience but a Masters qualifies you only to either teach in a college or apply for one of the entry level positions you were free to apply to, and probably had a decent chance at getting, before you earned said Masters degree.

    You can get a "foot in the door" as a dispatcher (no Masters required). You can get your foot in the door as a police officer (no Masters required). You can get your foot in the door as a corrections officer (no Masters required). If your goal is to get into that field there are many ways to get your foot in the door that don't require a Masters.

    It is equally useless for people who are jumping on the current bandwagon of "I'm gonna code for a living." Want to code? Code. But if you worked a non-coding job, earned a Masters in some computer subject, and are now looking for work, the reality is you are disadvantaged. Your resume shows someone with a Masters degree and absolutely zero relevant work experience. You'd be better off taking your non-CS degree, earning a Microsoft certification or two and getting a job in field (that's the foot in the door we keep talking about) than showing up with a masters.

    Or, you know, don't believe me. I have a stack of perpetually unemployed masters graduates who apply for every job I post every single time. All the while other people without masters degrees walk past them into the hiring room because they found ways into their desired field rather than hoping a Masters degree would do the heavy lifting for them.
     
  4. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    CJ faculty at a college is not working in the criminal justice field. It's working in academia where you are focused on criminal justice.
     
  5. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    An acquaintance of mine, Michael Prince, was a loan officer of a bank here in Oklahoma. Went and got his MBA at Duke and then moved into being the CFO of Converse, then CFO of Nike, then COO of Guess, then President and COO of Cole Haan, and now President and CEO of US Polo Assn. Global Licensing Inc.

    His Bachelor's Degree in accounting certainly did not land those positions for him. Thank goodness for that master's degree!

    NOTE: this example is NOT the norm for everyone but it is the one that comes to mind.
     
  6. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    ...your example actually proves my point and not the one you appeared to be making earlier.

    Your acquaintance certainly pivoted his career. However, one can be a CFO with a bachelors degree in accounting. It's not super common any more. But it is absolutely still a thing. It helped a career trajectory. That CFO job was not a "foot in the door." This wasn't an entry level position. It was a leap from one career level to another.

    It would be like if I became a VP of HR. That's a perfectly reasonable trajectory for someone in my position. My MBA helping me get there is not "getting a foot in the door."

    My point is, to mix and match our examples a bit, if Mr. Prince wanted to work in HR and was working as a loan officer, going out and earning a Masters degree in HR is certainly an option. However, he would not be able to walk out of that program and into being an HR manager unless it was for a very small company and he was a super smooth talker. I got my foot in the door with HR in two ways; serving as a personnelman in the Navy and an initially very low level recruiter position with Manpower which I was able to parlay into a job that didn't suck in the same field.

    Michael Prince was a loan officer at a bank. Like it or not, that's "working in finance." He undoubtedly acquired skills, language and experience that was highly relevant to his work as a CFO. His MBA enabled him to level up in his career just like my MSM did for me. That's not the same as using a masters degree to "get your foot in the door."

    Edit: By the way, Michael Prince was a VP of Corporate Finance in Oklahoma. While that may have functionally been a loan officer, he wasn't peddling $1,000 loans to farmers and becoming a CFO was absolutely not an absurd step in his career. Career progression is not the same thing as career change.
     
  7. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    sounds like someone who has a lot of trouble keeping a job

    [​IMG]
     
  8. JoshD

    JoshD Well-Known Member

    I would like to have his problem then. Haha
     
  9. chrisjm18

    chrisjm18 Well-Known Member

    In the sense of police, courts, and corrections, they wouldn't be working in the CJ field. However, a master's in CJ is an entry-level qualification to become a criminal justice college instructor at most schools. Ok, how about Texas Juvenile Probation Officer (JPO) requirements? As we know, probation is one of the sub-components of corrections. To become a JPO in Texas, you must have a bachelor's degree plus one year of experience in counseling, case management, or community work. However, one year of graduate study (defined as 12 hours, so not quite a master's) is accepted as a substitution for the experience. I've also seen other CJ positions where a master's substitute for a year or two of the work experience requirement. So, technically, the master's is serving as an entry-level qualification for the position when people lack the work experience.
     
  10. Dr. Natasha Johnson

    Dr. Natasha Johnson New Member

    Thanks SO much, JoshD!
     
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  11. Stanislav

    Stanislav Well-Known Member

    It's nice that coding is still "current bandwagon". It's true that computing is a set of skills, and experience (and innate attitude) count for more than advanced degrees.

    However, I would not discount education background in hiring. I've worked with people from nontech backgrounds who made transition to coding, and many of them have some nonobvious gaps in knowledge. They often invent convoluted solutions to common problems that make software objectively worse. In fact, an my first "real" job, my boss was this. He was a Dutch man with a degree in humanities who co-founded a small Web development company; we were young tech students he recruited to be their offshore development team in Ukraine. The guy was a big tech enthusiast and excellent salesman who taught himself Macromedia ColdFusion and SQL, and could use terms like "denormalized" in a sentence. However, he didn't have a feel for eg. what a normalized database should actually look like, and why, and what moving big chunks of data "cost" in terms of performance. As a result, they coded 80% of a e-commerce solution that slowed to a halt, because neither tables nor queries followed any kind of coherent design. Rewriting this baby was our first test (and remember, all of us were green, with no real experience at that time). Experience and education are complementary things, and only partially compensate for one another.

    I teach one grad class now, actually. Most students in the MS program at this regional state school are international students; for us, graduate STEM degree, besides content, means extra 24 month of OPT work authorization. I haven't actually talked to the students much outside the class, but I bet it a substantial motivator for them.
     
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  12. Neuhaus

    Neuhaus Well-Known Member

    I get your point. I really do. My point is just that 1) if your field was SO unrelated to CS that it cannot possibly be used to justify a transition to CS work on its own, you are almost certainly going to require prereqs. You can't just show up on day 1, never having taken CS 101 and be enrolled in an MS in CS. At least, not in a good one. 2) For a person to, as you say, use that education to think smarter about CS, you're talking about a lengthy process for someone in the midst of a career transition and one that will be aided by working in a production environment rather than shaking and baking in school hoping to be better refined by the time they hit the job market.

    I would absolutely discount education under the conditions we are talking about. If a person in a non-STEM role went out and got an MS in CS and had no relevant work experience and no training besides that Masters, they have an uphill battle ahead of them. Meanwhile, someone with a degree in theater and is a recent graduate of the right boot camp can get a job. Once there they can go out and continue to learn and become top tier computer scientists if they so choose. I'm not talking about someone who enrolls straight out of high school. I'm talking specifically about career changers who need to work while studying. The work experience for those folks is much, much more valuable than a degree. And those degrees "age out" very quickly without some recent work experience. If you have a degree in CS from Harvard from 1993 and haven't worked in a related field since then, you're not getting a coding job. Period.

    Why spend the time and the money on something that starts ticking away to obsolescence the day you graduate?
     
  13. Stanislav

    Stanislav Well-Known Member

    I learned not to pass a big structure into a recursive function by value (and also watch for local storage) in 1996; it's equally true today. Maybe more so.

    Point is, yes, MS CS is not the most efficient way to get a "foot in the door" in coding - but if your software is business-critical, someone on the team better have BOTH experience AND education. Early lights like Dijkstra and Knuth considered coding a branch of mathematics (Dijkstra chose programming over nuclear physics because he "wanted a challenge"); in boot camps, they have no way to teach these aspects, with all the complexity modern software engineering entails. A degree doesn't guarantee anything, true, but I saw too much code by the career changes to deny it matters.

    Also, if someone has a degree in CS from Harvard from 1993 and haven't worked in the field since, that guy doesn't want a coding job.
     

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