my path to a master's degree
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I've just completed my master's degree, something that took 2 1/2 years. Which is not to say I studied for 2 1/2 years on a sequence of university-grade courses in a program that resulted in the degree. I had to take the difficult route.
It started with no knowledge that I was working on a master's degree. I started, in fact, with my first certification, in project management. I'd noticed that almost everything I've ever worked on has been "project work", meaning a non-repeating span of work separate from normal operations: discrete activities toward a certain goal, within a set time period that ends. I'd also noticed that many of these projects were prone to the same problems: insufficient support from the organization; insufficient preparedness for the unexpected; and lack of collaboration. So I studied the field and earned a "Project Management Professional" designation just a week before The Girl was born.
With that done, I considered an MBA. But there are problems with that "degree" (I think of it more like a generalist business certification): there are more than three million MBA's at this time, and the MBA's I've worked with have been by and large pretty helpless in the workplace. I know it's different when you do it later in life, but it just didn't seem my path. So I looked at risk. I had already been looking at the certifications available in the information risk space, and had decided that the IT audit certs all looked pretty silly. But there was the internal audit space, and it covered a lot of the business risk work I'd already been studying.
So I bought the prep tests and some study materials and set to the second of four exams that would lead to the "Certified Internal Audit" designation. I say second because I had a waiver on the first for holding the PMP. But whereas the PMP exam had been multiple choice with a 60% required to pass, this one was multiple choice but with a required 80%. It took much more work than the PMP had, and was reasonably difficult when I sat it around Christmas of 2012 after about 150 hours of study: far more than I'd put into the lone PMP exam. Ominously, the proctor who gave my results when I exited the exam looked impressed and said, "Congrats, a lot of people fail that one." The second exam I wrote the following spring, and I found it unreasonably difficult, as difficult as anything I'd written. And worryingly, I'd put in another ~180 hours of study. Things were not getting at all easier as I went! And then came the third exam, which is certainly the hardest exam I've ever sat. It was heavy on finance and accounting and while I'd been "studying to the exams" that's not a great way of learning depth and you needed depth to deal with the case studies in that damn exam. Case studies for an multiple-choice audit certification? When I emerged from that, the proctor just said, "Wow! A lot of people write that one first, and if they don't pass they don't try the easier ones. For me, the real problem was that I'd had to put in some 220 hours of study: ten hours a week for more than five months. It had consumed me during Mari's parents' visit, and I'd wiped out a year of my life.
Needless to say, I'd noticed the problem that I was over-investing in a certification long before the end. I'd also started to notice that it might be tougher to get into the audit game than I'd thought: I'd been speaking to people about it and it seemed that "assurance work" is something you do at the outset of your career. This made little sense to me, but I was starting to suspect I was on the wrong track. So before I'd even sat the final exam, I cast about for some credit to obtain that could utilize the CIA designation. I found some universities in the UK that offered master's degree courses that recognized the CIA for all the taught classes. So I set my sights on one that offered a credit for ALL of the taught classes; I'd only have to do a dissertation and I'd have a masters degree.
I'd put around 550 hours into the CIA designation, and I found myself doing about the same with the dissertation. I'm happy enough with the work, it gave me a strong sense of how to judge risk and gave me a broad view of business that I wasn't going to otherwise get. And the time was the only real cost. Along the way, my employer was slowly reimbursing me for the costs of the exams and materials, at a rate of $500 per year. So it was a low-cost route to a degree, to be sure. With one year at $6,000 and about $1,200 all in for the CIA and maybe $300 for the PMP, it was possibly the cheapest MSc in history.