I'm a 37 year old husband of one, father of two, full-time student, and entrepreneur. For the last ten years I've bounced back and forth between being a financial advisor and a real estate agent. They seem very different but actually have a lot in common. They both involve the largest amounts of money you will likely deal with in your life; your retirement nest egg and your home. In the past few years both of those have lost huge portions of their value.
A little history
Late last year(2008) with the financial markets in the toilet I moved back toward real estate and did OK selling multi-family real estate to investors. (Read: through the generosity of my broker I was able to scrape by doing a few deals that he gave me, likely because he felt sorry for me). In May of 2009 I started an Internet Marketing Bachelor's Degree program at Full Sail Online. It was a way to validate much of the marketing knowledge I've acquired on my own through the past few years.
To be honest, I had been looking for a job in marketing for a few weeks before starting the program and realized that I was going to need a degree to even get an interview. Not to put down degrees (I'm putting myself in debt equaling the cost of a really nice car to get one) but I've interviewed some of these marketing degree graduates while I was in financial services and many of them didn't really impress me with their market knowledge or intellectual prowess. I'm no Einstein, but I would imagine that if you were a marketing major you could at least do a little investigation on the company you are interviewing with. In 9 years and at least a 100 interviews I had maybe 5 that actually knew more about the company than the name. I had one or two of those who had poked around on the website and a maybe did a Google search. No one had looked at company financials, looked on industry websites, Googled the CEO, etc.. I digress, I realized that HR people, recruiters, and algorithms in HR software automatically eliminate people without degrees so I decided I better get one.
Back to school
I did my research and explored the local options: University of New Orleans, Loyola University, and Tulane University. They all would have been cheaper than where I'm currently attending but they had one pesky little problem: they required me to attend a physical classroom at a set time. With two kids and a job where sales calls can happen at any day and time that was impossible.
I looked into the virtual options. I looked at Western Governor's University, University of Phoenix, and Full Sail University Online. Two of these also have physical campuses (Phoenix and Full Sail) in addition to their online programs and felt that might be a benefit. The degree programs offered were similar but Full Sail stood out because it had a marketing degree that was focused on internet marketing and not traditional marketing.
Ok, I need to clarify something here. Internet Marketing on the web has many different meanings. A search on Google will turn up some very interesting results. The first result is from Wikipedia and it states:
"Internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing, web marketing, online marketing, or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet."
This is kind of broad. Lets look at the rest of the results: growing your internet business, making money online, how to make millions online, you get the picture. THIS IS NOT WHAT I AM MAJORING IN.
Full Sail took a traditional marketing degree and decided that rather than adding a class on e-marketing or e-commerce to outdated concepts on marketing they would focus on the digital side of marketing for the bulk of the curriculum. This is exactly what I wanted. There are classes on management, business models, and statistics just like a regular university but there are also classes on SEO, internet business models, and marketing through blogs, social networks, podcast, and video games.
Once, at Full Sail I discovered a Master's program in Educational Media Design & Technology. I'm very interested in this degree and getting tech integrated into schools but I don't know if after graduating I would even be able to pay my student loans with what teachers get paid.
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