What's An Honest Man To Do?

I got my letters on Monday... weeee... I'm now officially an MBA. And suddenly I find myself on the horns of a dilemma: a lot of people are impressed, but I really want to tell them not to be.

It's pretty funny when you think about it. I undertook an MBA for the express purpose of impressing people and furthering my career (and maybe learning something in the meantime) but I now feel compelled to downplay my "accomplishment". The process of actually getting the degree was primarily an excercise in putting in time; it means something, I suppose, but not what people think it means.

Meh... if people at work suddenly start listening to me I suppose there's benefit in that. But at the same time it will reveal a certain hollowness to the business of doing business which mirrors the vacuity of my degree. Tomorrow I'll be telling people the same things I said last week, but they'll suddenly have weight because I've been blessed by an institute of higher learning. It matters not a whit that the program itself was a joke. God... I can't help but feel that I'm contributing to the problem by perpetuating the illusion that an MBA actually means something.

Honestly, it doesn't. I may have, at one point, argued that it at least served a sifting function. But now that I've seen the process from beginning to end I can't even say that. The people that went in dumb as a bag of hammers came out just as dumb. Worse still, they think that they're educated and other people will believe it, even though that's the furthest thing from the truth.

And therein lies the rub: the right thing to do is tell people it's all a pack of lies, even though that means devaluing myself in the process. As much as I'd like to do that, though, I've competing obligations. I have a wife and child which will benefit from the raises/promotions which will likely occur in the future as a byproduct of my newly-elevated status. I can't sacrifice their well-being to just to satisfy my desire to tilt at the windmills of stupidity.

Bah... dammit all anyway.