April 20, 2011 – Future?

So about that school that provoked the apartment emotions… I have been thinking of going back to school and get a PhD in organizational psychology. Actually, since I came to this country 12 years ago, I have been always considering school – MBA degrees mostly – but I have also always found a ton of excuses to postpone it. Only last year, in my "meditation" hammock, I finally realized that I didn't really want an MBA, I just thought it would be "the right thing to do", so no wonder it was always so easy to talk myself out of it.

This degree sounded right from the very beginning. This is pretty much what I have been doing at my old job, but instead of focusing on one company for years and always fight with the upper management for the validity of your optimization ideas, I'll be able to diversify and work with many companies and my opinion will be welcome, sought out and respected (and probably much better paid for).

The good thing is that I can do it online (while traveling!) without any potential damage to my resume. In fact, the school I selected totally intuitively without even reading too much about it (it just clicked somehow in my brain that I have to go there and nowhere else) – Chicago School of Professional Psychology – turned out to be the oldest and apparently most respected schools for this degree.

When in Boston at Jennifer's I listened in on an "ex"-work conference call dedicated to the process of 360-degree employee performance evaluation. Of course, I was very interested in what they had to say, because I personally implemented this tool in our team 6-7 years ago and had been trying to push – in vain – the rest of the company to take advantage of it. And of course, this evaluation tool was pretty much the same as the one created by me, but I guess mine wasn't as reliable because it didn't cost that much money… But that's not the point. The point is that the very first words uttered by the new owner of the company introducing a performance evaluation consultant were: "Please meet so-and-so. She graduated with a Masters in organizational psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology (never underestimate the power of your intuition), the oldest, greatest and most respected schools in this field in the US. Organizational psychology is a very important field of business science… blah… blah… blah…"

If I had any doubt before this meeting, now I am 100% convinced – the mothership is calling me home.