Goodbye for now!

This will be the final post relating to my masters degree, so will act as an informal wrap-up post.

The trip to La Jolla was an amazing experience, which I feel privileged to have experienced as I'm fully cognisent that most masters students will not have the opportunity for such trips within a 12-month course, let alone a 4-month summer placement.

I have learned a great deal from this experience. The most important of which is that it doesn't matter who you are, or what you used to be - once you are a student, you are unfortunately at the bottom of the food chain, and therefore subject to the whims of administrators employed by The System.

I am a certified Project Management Professional, with industry honed experience of managing multi-million pound projects, but even I have had to concede that as a student I have no authority or power to overcome obstacles presented to me by The System. It's very unfortunate, but my experiences on this project have led me to believe that academic institutions have taken the worst (instead of the best) processes and procedures from the Public Sector and Private Business, and knitted them together for their staff to follow.

It's therefore disappointing that I have to conclude in my final post within this Blog that NO, a Masters Degree Project cannot be Project Managed, and that this is not due to the competence of the student, but directly due to the bureaucracy inherent in The System, and the inability to resolve issues in a timely manner.

I just hope that I don't encounter similar issues during my forthcoming PhD - and that's the subject of another Blog to be commenced in the near future. Goodbye for now!