Pursuing the Engineering Management BSE at ASU - A good investment?

<p>I have a BS in IT, and a technical degree in audio engineering. I work as an audio engineer, handle the IT for the company, and I'm an instructor as well. </p>

<p>I'm 30 and "just getting by" in SoCal. I don't see a reasonable pathway to making much more money given my degrees, or the fields in which I am working. I do love my work however!</p>

<p>Since I do enjoy numbers, stats, information, and business, I recently discovered the field of Industrial Engineering. The ASU EM degree is just like their IE degree, except it includes courses in finance, accounting, and management, replaces quality control with risk management, etc...</p>

<p>Goals:
Graduate (in 2015) with a job offer that pays at least 50K in a cost-of-living such as San Diego.
Have multiple industries I can work in, to stay diverse.
Have clear opportunities for advancement in these industries.
Be able to work away from a desk, with a variety of coworkers and clients to help improve the operations of a company I REALLY care about.
Someday be a COO of a successful company.</p>

<p>To those working as Engineers in the US, does this sound reasonable and does it make sense to take a loan for up to 35K (at max) to do this? I have no debt whatsoever as of now. Thanks!</p>

<p>You have a BS in IT and your and an audio engineer and instructor, your 30 years old and you make less than $50k in SoCal?? I don’t know what your doing wrong (part of it might be if your degree is from somewhere like UofPhoenix, but I don’t have a bachelor’s degree, I am an audio engineer also and I’m 28; I make $70k+ per year, own my own recording studio (not included in the $70k) and I teach ProTools as well. I live in San Diego and have a mortgage of $3,000 per month. So, do I think you need to dump $35k into a degree over 2-4 years in the hopes of making $50k a year??? Hell no!!! I think you need to take another look at your situation and try to find the root cause of your problem of “just getting by.” Also, don’t let yourself be run by money or degrees, if you’re doing what you love already, that’s a hell of a lot better than most people!! Try and adapt what your currently doing to earn you some more money but still maintain your happiness. I came across your thread because I just looked at ASU’s BSE in Eng. Mgmt. I’m glad I came across your thread because it made me realize I’m better off improving my situation rather than throwing money at a degree and “hope” that it makes me more happy by increasing my salary a little bit. Thanks!!!</p>

<p>Also, the fact that you have no debt now, keep it that way, your salary may be lower than a lot of people, but when factor in their debt, you probably bring home way more than they do!!!</p>

<p>And rather than hoping to be COO of a company you really care about, why don’t you go MAKE that company you really care about, yourself!!! Don’t wait for opportunities, create opportunities!</p>

<p>Just a thought…</p>

<p>Don’t even bother.
The purpose of a degree in the first place is to prove that you have a solid foundation in your field. That is something worth paying exorbitant student loans for, assuming you can actually use that. HOWEVER, you already have that credential - you have an engineering degree.</p>

<p>It is folly to spend $35,000 on another education. Let’s put opportunity cost and cost of attendance aside here and consider this only in terms of your direct costs. What do you actually get that makes it worth $35k? You don’t get a distinction; you already have that. You already proved to any employers that you can do the calculus, physics, and that you can learn the job they want you to do. All you’re getting for that $35k is some additional education, which is worth nothing even close to $35k (let alone the $100-200k that it would actually cost you, all things considered). </p>

<p>Want to know how to get what you would get from that EM degree for about 1% of the cost? Find all the required courses for that degree, and buy the textbooks that they use. Want it even cheaper (and more effectively)? Use something more useful for learning than textbooks written in a needlessly complex manner. For engineering, the best solution is to find a better textbook to learn from. For business/finance, you might not even need a textbook because the important concepts are fundamentally simple (the difficulty is in applying them right), and this is not likely to change at any point in the near future. You can even skip the parts of the course that aren’t useful to you by using this approach. This approach saves lots of time, lots of money, and is effectively the same result with less debt.</p>

<p>As for how to accomplish your goals:

You don’t need three years of education to do that. Three years of experience is probably worth more.</p>

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A strong foundation in calculus and physics, along with a willingness to learn more, will do that. Most industries that require a very specific degree do so not because of necessity, but because they can afford to be picky. That’s a sign you don’t really want to go work there. Learn more programming languages, learn statics+dynamics/circuits/chemical reactors and you’ll have a chance at breaking into your industry of choice assuming that the field is worth going into and that you know or can figure out how to sell yourself.</p>

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It’s up to you to make these. Figure it out; I’m sure you can if you really want it. </p>

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Just a matter of finding the right company. Not always easy, but it’s not bad.</p>

<p>

You’re definitely not on the right track. More important than ANY formal education is the ability to get things done. At the highest level, any BS you put in will be seen very clearly by the entire company, and the board of directors of the company will fire you on the spot if you act irresponsibly. And thinking that you’re qualified because of your education is very much BS.</p>

<p>If you’re not really in any hurry to make a stable living, I suggest you learn a bit more on your own about what you want to know more about, and then go work at an early phase startup that interests you. You’re almost certainly not going to strike gold and make it rich (90% of startups fail, and the majority of stocks go to cofounders/investors anyways), but you get to try doing a lot of things at once and a lot of companies worth working at value startup experience. If you don’t like that, figure something out. But education is not the key.</p>