GRADUATE SCHOOL

I was thrashing around trying to decide on some career to feed my family. I had a meeting with Dr. McDonald who was the LDS president of the state college. I had considered the possibility of teaching in elementary school.  He counseled me to go for a PhD and teach in college. I was admitted to the doctoral program at UCLA. To my surprise, the dean of the graduate school called me in and said he had a request from North American Aviation to choose a doctoral student who had both technical and business experience. He was nominating me.

North American hired me part time to head up a group of other PhD students in a group called the Managing Research Team.  It was a wonderful blessing because my duty consisted primarily of working in the UCLA research library and to report to North American any articles that I found that might be applicable to their company. So, I was being paid for what I had to do for my academic studies anyway. Later North American stepped up my employment to full time. Our division was building the Apollo space capsules. I was shocked at how large these capsules were. When I found it necessary to use more of my time in my studies North American urged me to take a leave of absence and continued my insurance, hoping that I would decide to return full time. That never happened since I became a faculty member at Northridge.

In connection with my doctoral studies I found that I had enough credits to receive an MBA as a side product. When my MBA certificate arrived in the mail there was also a duplicate certificate for my wife entitled, PHT…”Putting Hubby Through”. I completed all the course work and qualifying exams for a doctorate in four fields: information systems, economics, finance and business theory.

I attended an interesting seminar with Harry Markowitz in Simscript computer language. I introduced that language to North American Aviation. Later, Dr. Markowitz said my project was the best of all his students and we became close friends. I finally convinced him to come teach a graduate class at Northridge. When the president of the university happened to mention at a conference that Dr. Markowitz was teaching some graduate seminars, they asked, “do you know who you have?”  He had no idea of Harry’s reputation. Later on Harry Markowitz received a Nobel Prize for work he did for his dissertation, which we studied in the seminar.  

I needed two languages and hoped to get German, thinking that it would come back to me.  However, German was not offered, so I struggled through French I failed the first exam, but passed the second one, thus all my requirements except a dissertation were completed.   

My dissertation committee was selected and appointed and we were negotiating a subject for my dissertation. At this time I was under heavy pressure with my teaching at Northridge, business consulting, and a growing family. I had tenure as a full professor and a doctorate would not have meant anything financially to my career and I was getting very discouraged with the various dissertation subject which struck me as being more make-work than interesting, so dispite the urging of UCLA to finish the dissertation, I reluctantly dropped out, having a ABD, “All But Dissertation”.