Last week, I wrote about the plans I’ve made since receiving the notice that I didn’t get into the Logic and Philosophy of Science Master’s program. They revolve around three important decisions. Remember them?
- Learning to speak German is the most important thing I’m doing right now related to my career
- Getting my Master’s degree in 2014-15 is more important than resuming my career with a conventional full-time job
- I want to start making money again, soon
If you don’t remember them because you didn’t read that post, then you can send your apologies to ohgodforgivemeryan@gmail.com. Go on. Send them.
What I didn’t do in that post is explain why I made those particular decisions. So, that’s what I’m doing right now. “Why” is approximately infinity times more important than “what,” in any case. Maybe that’s your point of view, too. And here we go.
Learning German is the Most Important Thing I’m Doing
While everyone in Bayern under the age of (I think) 50 had to learn English in school, English is not the way most people operate day-to-day in Munich. For them, it seems a bit like it is for me and about 7 billion other Texans. That is, many of us learned Spanish, but we would always prefer English and, in fact, would rarely have the opportunity to use our second language. The result is much the same, as well. Some in Munich speak phenomenal English (as some Texans speak phenomenal Spanish), but many need to focus their minds while speaking and listening, requiring that conversation remain somewhat slow and basic. It’s that symptom that everyone who learns a second language understands: until you live among native speakers for at least a few months, speaking a second language is a bit of a mental chore. I happen to be in that “native speaker” situation, while the German friends I meet here are not. So, I should learn German so that I can meet, practice and speak with the Germans.
More specifically, though, learning German will 1) let me function in German culture, 2) open up maybe 100 extra Master’s degree options which are only taught in German and 3) make me a viable candidate for employment at a “smaller” company, at which German speech appears to be the norm, intra-office.
*****Tangent: Why do I want the option to work at a “smaller” company? I’m young and want to build a unique structure of marketing knowledge before I seek a team management position. In general, smaller companies have weaker bureaucracies than larger ones, and they’re less convinced that they have all the answers already. At the smaller companies I’m talking about, the goal is to figure out how to win. Their antithesis is the large company at which the goal is to keep doing what wins. I believe you learn more (about marketing to consumers) in a shorter period of time at the smaller company, so that’s where I’m thinking I’ll head, next. All that said, “small company” is just the name I’m giving that archetypal corporate culture–the literal size of the company isn’t important otherwise.
Earning a Master’s Degree: More Important than Full-Time Work
Every single day, I feel anxious about my absence from the Marketing arena. Is Aurasma any more useful now than it was 4 months ago? Could I use SnackTools to develop an effective microsite-ad-widget campaign really quickly for a product I manage? Can I create a video for a B2B company that lasts longer than 2 minutes and retains 80+ percent of its viewers? Can I find or create a human personality to represent a company or product that people in my target audience actually admire and follow (really follow ideologically, not one-night-stand-style Twitter follow, or politically motivated LinkedIn follow)? And then there’s the mountains of consumer data companies can access with their Web Analytics suites. I miss SiteCatalyst.
With a company’s resources (and audiences), I could be answering those questions, swimming in consumer data, and honing my marketer’s edge. If you’re in my position right now, then you know that option sounds astoundingly tasty. But it’s not the best option, yet.
The best option is going back to school, and two reasons make that the case. The first is that I’ll be competing with Master’s graduates in the future. The second is that academia has a way of giving a marketer ideas that the corporate world struggles to offer. The first reason is obvious, so I’ll just take a bit of space to explain the second one.
Academia is brimming with enthusiasm and idealism. Enthusiasm and idealism foster creativity and experimentation. Creativity and experimentation sometimes lead to success and sometimes to failure, but always to a sharper mind.
Think about it: in a normal business class, you’re given a project like “develop a marketing plan to reintroduce this fledgling local TV station to its market.” Then you go figure out how to do it with your team. Only your team. You guys get to go through all four stages of team development without “preemptive mediation” from outside your team (that means managers try to help you avoid the storming phase). You get to challenge each other’s ideas using marketing logic instead of the logic of internal politics. You get to create an entire pitch on your own, so the client has to wait until the idea is ready before they can get scared and reign you in prematurely. Then, you actually get to pitch your plan.
Oh, and then you get blunt, unadulterated feedback that doesn’t have to care about morale.
And if you don’t do as well as you wanted to do, then you can learn why and apply it to your next project.
The professional world struggles to offer that kind of no-holds-barred development to its inhabitants. That is, companies sometimes need to bar a lot of holds. If my marketing experiment (read: project) fails, and the culture around my boss would look down on him for it, then he is going to feel one hell of an urge to peer over my shoulder and nix those of my ideas that he didn’t expect. So, the easiest way to learn at a company is to learn from the company–do what its employees have been doing for years and learn how well those methods work. After you do that, learning whether or not there’s something better you could be doing for the company is a major challenge. It’s a fun one, but nevertheless major.
******Tangent: Come to think of it, that “learning from the company” bit makes hopping from company to company a pretty rational lifestyle. Once you learn how your company wins, and you stop learning more, then you move to the next company and learn how it wins until you stop learning more. You can get a lifetime’s worth of good business ideas that way.
So I’ll go back to school. A year of classes followed by a year of work/thesis will be a fantastic mental exercise. Then, I’ll go back to the business world, where plan-execute-analyze-improve applies to pitching program ideas to coworkers more often than pitching products or services to customers. And by that time, the ideas I’ll be pitching will be better than they are now.
I Want to Start Making Money Again, Soon
The rationale behind this decision won’t surprise a single one of you. I came over here with an appropriate amount of savings, but over time I’m feeling anxious as my savings only decline without offset. Roxana is employed, so the worst case scenario isn’t catastrophic, but it would still take a significant emotional toll on me.
That means I would feel uncomfortable in a scenario that has Roxana bearing the entire financial burden of the relationship. She, angelically as usual, assures me that I’m worried about something stupid, but I nonetheless can’t shake the awkwardness.
So, I’m looking for a part-time job doing something in Marketing (read: something with a company’s customers). Since I don’t know German at a professional level, yet, one of my first stops is the Munich Arbeitsamt–the employment office. I want to ask them what kinds of jobs and employers in the city prioritize English and don’t mind if the employee is in the middle of learning German.
So those are they–the reasons behind my decisions. I’ll keep you in the loop on how everything goes.