JohnIt’s been awhile since I wrote about my Master programs. Actually, it’s been awhile since I’ve wrote anything. Trying to keep up with blogging during a pandemic, working full-time, and taking classes was a lot harder than I had expected it to be. Regardless, I thought I should update my two blog readers about my progress in school.
It was the beginning of this year that I decided I would no longer pursue the Master of Science in Computer Science degree. One of the major factors was the amount of money it would take to complete the course. Because I did not take my undergrad courses at the University of Michigan – Flint, I was missing a lot of prerequisite courses that were needed for the MSCSIS courses. I could not reason the extra amount of school loans I would need to pursue this Master degree, so I dropped from the dual-enrollment and now I am focused solely on my MBA.
Now that is out of the way, from my last post about education until now, I have completed the following courses:
- MGT 541 – Organizational Behavior
- FIN 551 – Business Economics
- MKT 531 – Marketing Management
- FIN 561 – Financial Management
- MGT 581 – Management Information Systems
Now, I am almost done with MGT 552 – Non-market Strategy and CIS 515 – Cloud Computing. After these two courses, I would then have six courses left that I would hope to be done by this time of 2021. I say hope because COVID-19 has altered course availability and the rotation schedule. Good thing my advisor was there to help me navigate a new plan for the quickest completion.
With that update out of the way, here’s some insight on the two courses I am currently in.
MGT 552 – Non-market Strategy
Judging by the name of the class, I wasn’t sure what to expect for this course. Having gone through it, the curriculum was built upon ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder management. It was a different side to business and how Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) can either make or break a business. With our Business & Society book, we also used Ethics 101 to dive deeper into ethical questions about running a business. I will say that Ethics 101 is probably the most simple book I’ve read on the topics. Translating it to the business realm was really easy.
Taking a closer look at CSR, it was interesting to see how everything has levels and the number of stakeholders in each position. Taking an extra second to think about how many groups there are out there that aren’t hesitant on putting you on full-blast for something a business did wows me in how businesses are still functioning. One of the biggest revelations I had though was questioning if the changing society puts more ethical pressure organizations or is it something else. This diagram from the book kind of clears that up:
This diagram shows that overtime, society’s expectations of business ethics and actual business ethics have grown to a big disconnect. This conveys that society is making it quite difficult for businesses to stay on their toes when it comes to ethics.
I learned quite a bit about ethics at different levels such as government, to business, to management, but I believe it was learning about the relationship between society and businesses that I’m going to utilize in the future.
CIS 515 – Cloud Computing
This course was exactly what I expected, based on the class name. It revolved around three cloud services: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Then we went into examples of each service such as Office 365, iCloud, and Salesforce. There was a lot of technical reading that didn’t come in play with our exams, but it was still interesting to see how complex cloud computing can get. One thing I accomplished that I have never done before was write a paper in IEEE format. To be honest though, I spent more time trying to format the paper than the actual writing of it. I have my final that I still need to take for this class, so wish me luck.
Overall, these two classes have been beneficial and I have already been using that knowledge in the real-world. I’m looking forward to completing them and taking on the next courses.