Different Major than Undergraduate

sakky
Sat, 22 Jul 2006 09:37:40 +0000

Well, first off, I think having all of these master’s degrees is clearly excessive. The truth is, you often times don’t really need a master’s degree in a field to work in that field. For example, if you want to pursue creative writing, either as a career or just as a hobby, then you should just do creative writing. I would wager that the vast majority of successful authors do not have master’s degrees in any subject. In fact, some don’t even have bachelor’s degrees. The 2 pillars of American literature - Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain - never went to college at all.

The same is even more true in film. Honestly, how many of today’s leading filmmakers actually have advanced degrees in film? George Lucas has only a bachelor’s. So does F.F. Coppola. Spielberg dropped out of college and finished his degree only a few years ago. Oliver Stone dropped out. So did Woody Allen. Soderbergh never went to college at all. While there are a few highly successful filmmakers with MFA degrees, notably Scorsese and Ang Lee, I would surmise that most don’t. If you want to do film-making, just do film-making. If you want to learn how to do it, just get the books and read them yourself. You don’t really need to get a degree in it.

But anyway, you ask how one can get master’s degrees in topics unrelated to his bachelor’s and the answer is simple - many (probably most) master’s degree programs do not require that you have a bachelor’s degree in that specific subject, or even a related subject. This is especially true for a professional degree like the MBA where the vast majority of students do not have an undergrad degree in business. For example, in the MBA program at the Sloan School at MIT, there are almost twice the number of students who have bachelor’s degrees in engineering than in business. But even other programs can admit people from widely divergent backgrounds. I know a guy who just graduated with a Master of Science in Civil/ Environmental Engineering from MIT, but had no engineering undergrad background whatsoever. Instead, he has a BA in Biology from Harvard.

Another aspect is, the fact is, there are many master’s degree programs that are not that selective, such that even if your bachelor’s is in something totally unrelated, you can still get admitted. In fact, some schools offer near-open-admissions for their master’s degree programs, which basically means that as long as you bring certain minimum qualifications, you will probably be admitted. I believe that many of the master’s degree programs at the CalStates operate in this fashion. Which incidentally leads to the concept of market signalling. I would argue that, from an employability standpoint, having just one master’s degree (or even just a bachelor’s degree) from a highly selective school like Harvard or MIT is more valuable than having an entire slew of master’s degrees from a bunch of no-name schools.

However, I’m not terribly surprised to find teachers and profs who have a boatload of degrees. The fact is, if you’re a teacher or a prof, your employer will usually offer a continuing education subsidy to basically let you get more degrees part-time for free. That’s basically free money, and if somebody is offering you free money, you might as well take it. It somebody was offering to let me get a few more degrees for free, I’d probably do it. Why not? It ain’t my money.