WGU MBA-HM first impressions and ongoing comments

[dmjacobsen]

Happy New Year! Another month (er.. a bit more than that) and another update. Organizational Management is done. I had to resubmit two of the three tasks. One of the things that's getting more and more aggravating as time goes on in the program is the double-edged sword of the pass/fail system for grading written assignments. I added two sentences to a 16-page paper and that changed it from not meeting requirements to passing. In a traditional setting, I don't know that two sentences on a 16-page paper would carry that much weight. But, the system is what it is.

Org Management was pretty dull. It's essentially an organizational psychology course -- how to best involve people, make everyone feel like they're part of the team, combine cultures of two companies to create a synergistic organization. This course wasn't too difficult, having had plenty of psychology courses in the past and working for a company that is fairly stereotypical in its corporate approach to team-building. The biggest stumbling block for this course was its placement on the calendar, with Thanksgiving just ending, and Christmas and New Year's coming up at the end.

Leadership should start in about 10 days (it starts on the Monday of the second full week of each month). Again, it's scheduled for 4 weeks, but I'm hoping that I will have a team motivated to get it over with faster. There really doesn't seem to be a whole lot involved in the team-based portion of the class, so long as everyone just bucks up and does their work. But, that's always the problem with group projects, isn't it? I'm going to go ahead and do the non-team task tomorrow, which is just an analysis of your personal leadership style with a comparison and contrast with other leadership styles.

On the capstone front, my team has finished our practice rounds for the simulation. We did pretty terrible, but that's what the practice rounds are for. We're gearing up for the 8 simulation rounds and we're still hoping to be done with those in a couple of weeks. For the written project, I already have a pretty good outline of what I'm going to do -- just need to meet with my manager and go from there. It's nice to see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that it's not a train coming my way. I'm still confident that I'll be done with this by the end of February.

On the MSN front, I've switched back to Nurse Practitioner. I spent one semester in the Executive Leadership program, did fine (all A's), but I figure the NP degree is more flexible in the long run. Even if I don't want to be an NP, I can still go into administration or teach. On the flip side, I can't be an NP with the Executive Leadership degree. Also, the downsizing of my job at corporate opened up my eyes to the ease of losing an administration job (lots of high-level execs were cut along with my peon job), so I figure it's harder to downsize a Nurse Practitioner. That downsizing was probably a blessing in disguise, because I would have never switched back to NP if that hadn't happened.