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W-H-Y the M-B-A

2/27/2025

In my first post (my last post?), I promised to explain why and how I chose an MBA. That was two months ago (I did not promise to be consistent), and I figured that by the time I wrote I'd have a wonderful and well-thought-out response.

Nope!

I'm still trying to figure out whether there's a single underlying reason I came up with this hairbrained scheme, but for now my reasons are legion. Ergo, here's a constellation of reasons, none of which explain the whole thing (or anything):

Because school.
I love school. School makes me smarter. School lets me delay having a "real" job. School is an opportunity to learn from experts. School expands my world view. School keeps me on top of what's going on in the world so I can stay perpetually young and never die. School!
Because money.
I do what I love. There is no quantifying being able to do what you love for work--it might be the ultimate luxury. That said, what I love to do does not pay, and the country I live in fails SO hard at taking care of people -- especially people who are caring for other people. I have littles (plural now) at home, and the country I live in doesn't want them to have free ... anything. The only student loans I haven't paid off (and I think I'm at, like, six now) are the ones taken out to feed my kids while I try to go to school. Things aren't dire for us, but we're full-on at the top of our game work-wise and it's still paycheck to paycheck. That's ridiculous.
Because spite.
If THAT wasn't enough of a rant...just kidding. (I mean, it was, but you get it.) Here's a touch of background before a very long story short. I love my current position teaching in the English department at Ohio State. I have awesome classes (monsters! 3D printing! video games!), I have insane amounts of flexibility in how and where I do my insane amounts of work, and I get to hang with Gen-Z (and they're a good hang). That said, I have already hit my ceiling position and pay-wise. After a year and change here, a tenure-track position opened in the department in a field I'm very competent in. So with my amazing student evaluations (I am a damn good teacher) and already being on the payroll (a raise is cheaper than a whole new person), I applied. Academic applications are absolute marathons, but that's beside the point. The point is that I didn't even get the time of day. The hiring committee (half of which I know quite well) interviewed eight (EIGHT!) people, and I didn't even make that cut. I found out that I didn't make this cut in a department meeting. A couple weeks after that, I got an automated rejection from Workday (the HR platform), and a couple weeks after that, I got a nice but far-far-far-too-little-too-late personal email from a committee member that said, "It's not you, it's me."

Ooh, a second paragraph! I am fine -- honestly, perfectly fine -- with being passed over for the final position. Academic hiring is a fart of a process, and the field is beyond saturated. Also, they were looking for something very specific (which could have been included in the job posting, but whatever), and while I could easily do it I did not include much about that in my application materials. Also also, I have so, so, so many more creative publications than academic publications, and I'm already here, and we all know that if you're really good at your job they're likely going to trap you there. Ultimately, I want a tenure track position for a little more money (60k instead of 50, baby!) and a lot more job security (although Ohio is poised to gut academic freedom like a fish erelong), but it wasn't in the cards. Damn. But! It turns out that one of OSU's benefits to faculty is tuition remission (up to a point), so I figured if they didn't want to give me a promotion I would use their money to make my own promotion down the line and, if it's lucrative or mentally stimulating enough, bail on my current employer and laugh all the way to the bank, as they say. Do I want to do this? Absolutely not. Will I? Guess we'll find out if everyone actually can be bought. (It's me, I'm everyone.)
Because options.
It's absolutely possible we could stay here and work at Ohio State for the rest of my life. Planning farther out than three weeks is very un-Calvin-esque, but I may legit live, laugh, and croak in Columbus, Ohio. To scratch the itch that is my desire to always be a few moves ahead of my life, I want to ensure that if/when academia and/or Calvin implodes within academia (which may be sooner rather than later, since I just responded to an email OSU's president Walter "Ted" Carter, Jr. telling him the way he announced the "sunsetting" of a whole office as a roll-over to the political climate was poor leadership), I want my own fool's-golden parachute. I've done some legitimately awesome freelance work over the years, and if I need to make that full-time gig or find one outside of the university systems of the world that I love so dearly, I want as many pivot points as possible. An MBA pivots me into a world of new pivots, and I like that.

This post is long enough, so I'll leave the constellation at four catch-all reasons for now. I don't know if my heart is in business, but since my heart is full in myriad other ways I'm giving business a chance. If nothing else, I can go to school, learn from experts, figure out how a new part of the world works, get filthy rich, buy the Denver Nuggets, change their name to the Chicken Nuggets, and use all my profits from there on out to fund public education with free meals for people of all ages and get my name onto as many libraries as I can shake a stick at.

I just hope there's no math...

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Have I learned nothing?

12/30/2024

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I'm trying new things. I like trying new things. This post contains info about two things I'm trying.

Thing the first: I have started this blog. (Hi!) It's been a minute since I blogged, and it's been a minute since I blogged because it's been a minute since I felt I had something to blog about. Which leads me to thing the second.

Thing the second: I have started an MBA program. Well, I've been accepted into an MBA program which starts in early January. If you've known me more than a couple years, you understand this for the seismic shift it is. Calvin's not a business man—Calvin's a poet. Like, an actual poet. And an academic. Hasn't he, like, taught college for the last decade?

All of this is true. I even went so far as to finish my PhD in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media in May 2023, which was unbelievable timing, because HB (the person to whom I am married) landed a legit academic role (poorly paying tenure track for the win!) at Ohio State, and they wanted to hire HB so bad the provost's office paid a chunk of my salary to incentivize the English department to hire me. Spousal hire, baby!

Well, my friends, this poet-turned-academic feels he's washing out of academia (or, perhaps, more correctly, being thrown out with the academic bathwater, but more on that later). The life of an academic, especially a creative-turned-academic, is fraught with punches with which one must roll. I'm pleased (?) to announce that I finally took one of those punches square on the chin, and that chin shot coincides beautifully with my upcoming 40th birthday. Ergo, it seems my version of a midlife crisis might be summed up in the phrase, "When one door closes, it's time to go through that wall."

Enter the MBA. I promise to maybe explain why and how I chose an MBA later. For now, I will admit that at this point another seems like madness even to me, the king of going back to school instead of getting a job. My name (Calvin Olsen) has one more letter than the number of letters behind my name. And I'm fresh out of a PhD, which is a slog and a half (more on that later, too). I had graduated some version of school for the fifth time, landed me a nice little pays-less-than-McDonald's spousal-hire teaching gig, and paid off a solid 2.44% of my final student loan. I had made it—I had a five-year plan, for crap's sake. Then again, as my homeboy Bobby Burns says, "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley."

Join me as I take a run at that wall.

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W-H-Y the M-B-A

Have I learned nothing?

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