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An old acquaintance who I now only keep up with on occasion via Facebook recently posted a query to all of his Facebook friends (not to be confused with REAL friends) regarding what grad school he should pick. The problem was simple. He had applied to his dream program but was also accepted into an MBA program at one of the ivy league schools he hadn’t expected to get into, and now had to make a decision about which program would put him into a better position to “start and manage “sustainable development” projects in the realms of renewable energy, environmental restoration, and forestry/agriculture.”
He comments:
Both options have pros and cons. The Yale FES MEM comes with the Yale name brand and possible connections to northeast capital and well-established national/international groups, but it would be quite removed from the specifics of Appalachia and 12+ hours away from home. The total tuition-only price tag for two years after a scholarship (I’m going to try to haggle for more scholarship) is $52k. I’m somewhat concerned that I wouldn’t be taken as seriously by “real” business people (especially when structuring fairly large project financing) with a non-MBA degree, but I could take about half of my classes at the business school at Yale and end up with a very solid understanding of the financial side of this work. My understanding is that there isn’t a huge amount of technological innovation happening at Yale in sustainability/renewables, but I could be wrong.
The UNC K-F MBA is a highly ranked program (top 20 in the US, top 50 in the world), but I’m not sure if it would have very much name recognition beyond people in the corporate business world (who I do want to be able to get financing from). It’s only about 5 1/2 hours from home, but I think that part of NC is very removed from Appalachia and not too concerned about it. The Research Triangle Park (Silicon Valley of the East) is just down the road and there’s a ton of sustainability innovation happening there that I’d like to be able to implement in the coalfields, and I’d also be able to take classes at Duke. They didn’t offer any scholarship, and the two year tuition-only total there would be $111k. Basically I’d have to be pretty certain that the MBA would be significantly more valuable than the MEM to be able to justify the much higher cost at a place with a less prestigious name.
So I’m sure you can imagine that right now I’m probably a little bit green with envy. I was one of those classmates who scoffed at the fact that he was learning how to produce ethanol because there was a body of knowledge out there to support the fact that the emissions output of ethanol and biodiesel was much less clean that the current grade of diesel we’d been producing.
But after the historic tornadoes hit Eastern Kentucky back in the spring of 2012, and I discovered that he was the only source of fuel regionally, I realized that aside from the yields he was getting, that the knowledge he possessed was incredibly useful in a crisis and that perhaps I’d been short sighted because I hadn’t recognized the value he now contributed to his under-served community because he could produce something as critically essential as fuel.
[I should probably add the reason that I’d been downgraded to merely a Facebook friend is that during this time, I worked on coordinating local fuel companies with the Department of Kentucky Emergency Management for the Relief and Recovery of some of the more rural regions that had lost their communications. There were only two fuel companies listed in that area, so I recommended that they start there and his company (which I didn’t realize was affiliated with him at the time) was the only company with the capability to produce fuel on site, so he spent the next two weeks, against his will, rendering tons of animal fat into bio-diesel. Which as it turns out, can be kind of a deal breaker in a fledgling friendship)]. 😉
So in full acknowledgement that I may have already compromised my own credibility, even after apologizing for the way I mismanaged that aspect of the situation; I did, however, recommend the following:
At a glance, I noticed that UNC has a much more developed program when it comes to bio-remediation research, so you may have more established and specialized contacts if you were to do that work. Yale, however, seems to provide funding for studies abroad in developing nations etc. for anything you’d be interested in researching. If the end goal is to increase accessibility to the kind of resources that could really benefit the Appalachian region, then I would recommend setting up informational interviews with lower income masters and doctoral candidates from each program to determine what level of personal involvement and support you would get from your advisers.
If it turns out that you will get a lot of personal and professional development opportunities, I would lean toward the Ivy, but I would NOT recommend taking on debt with them unless you can land really good financial and mentorship support. But if they believe you would be able to generate good returns on your research and enhance the reputation of their program, I would encourage you to let them invest in you. You could still partner with programs like UNC and increase awareness about the culture, impacts of extraction, etc. and serve as an incredible conduit to create accessibility within the region… something you might not be able to do approaching from the other side.
As a pioneer at that level you do also have the opportunity to get up to up to speed with the latest metrics –which would give you a lot of usage data for future publications, allow you to expand your research network, and consequently help others who see the value in similar kinds of work in other areas with the same resource challenges as the Appalachian region.
Also, congratulations.
So I thought this would be a good opportunity to poll the commons:
Mixed Up Millennial 