Students in our professional master’s programs have a particular challenge. You are a practitioner who is taking a “break” from practice in order to adopt a more “theoretical” perspective on your work. The language of scholars, as well as their arguments and sources, will sometimes seem strange to you, and sometimes actually less “informed” than you are used to. Remember that we live in a “knowledge society”, which means that your power depends on your ability to leverage knowledge. Whether you agree with them or not, you want to be familiar with the conversation among experts that structures the perceptions of members of your profession.

As you proceed through your program, taking the various courses and modules, notice how the theories and concepts you are reading and talking and writing about are changing the way you look at your professional practices and activities. That’s a very good indication of their meaning, their significance. Notice also how they are helping you to talk about your organization with your classmates, often “peers” in a both a professional and intellectual sense. You are becoming better able to “generalize” about the sorts of experiences you have in your daily work. You are better able to share your challenges with people who work in perhaps very different organizations with very different specific issues.

Also, notice that you are starting to understand how the social sciences influence our culture. Very often you will read a newspaper column that tell what “a recent study shows” about issue related to your work. Through you own studies, you are learning how to evaluate these studies and apply their insights to your day-to-day practices or long-term strategies. Your superiors and your subordinates, your competitors and your customers, too, might have heard about these new results, and this may shape their reaction to your proposals. By learning how to situate a specific results within a larger body of literature, and how to write up results of your own, you are developing “academic” sensibilities that can have very real-world applications.