Graduate students take on double degrees

While some students debate whether or not they can take on graduate school, others seek even greater challenges. With around 150 graduate and professional programs at UCLA, the opportunities for earning a joint degree are abundant.

Jorge Rodriguez is just one of many students at UCLA pursuing a dual graduate degree. He is pursuing both a master’s of business administration from Anderson School of Management at UCLA and a juris doctorate at UCLA School of Law. After earning an undergraduate degree from Haas School of Business at Berkeley, Rodriguez worked as a compliance officer for a financial services firm, interacting with attorneys to make sure firms were in compliance with the law.

Rodriguez realized he would need to go back to school to be competitive in his field in a way that matched his ambition.

“I would be somewhat at a disadvantage because I didn’t have the same legal training (business colleagues) did,” Rodriguez said.

“If you’re very focused on long-term career goals, then a joint degree makes a lot of sense,” Rodriguez said. “But don’t go into it just because it sounds good.”

Associate Dean Eric Mokover from the Anderson School also warned students against choosing a joint degree program for that reason.

“Actually, it can be quite an obstacle. There’s a lot of distrust between the business and legal fields,” Mokover said.

“That would be a waste of $50,000 and a year of my life if I went into it just to add a few extra letters to my title,” said Bryan Hiscox, a second-year medical student at UCLA.

Hiscox said he is considering a program that allows him to work simultaneously toward a doctorate of medicine and master of business administration.

“In the past, physicians have been passive about the way the health care system has turned out,” Hiscox said.

“There are a lot of intersections between medicine, policy and business, and the more physicians there are that have the tools to navigate those intersections, the less other people are going to be controlling the health care system,” Hiscox said.

There has been a recent movement where medical schools are actually encouraging dual degree programs to their students, Hiscox said.

About 20 students are enrolled in a joint degree program at UCLA medical school each year, said Dr. Carl Stevens, an associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. Stevens also has a master’s in public health.

“The most common for the dual-degree students at Geffen is to take on a leadership role in a clinical organization,” Stevens said.

“Many students choose to pursue a joint degree while in medical school rather than later on in their careers because it’s a good time to add a second area of confidence that doesn’t disrupt their career path,” Stevens said.

However, some students might find it a disadvantage to pursue a joint degree. While the school itself might be prestigious, some students want the experience of studying at two different schools ““ possibly even abroad, Stevens said. Still, most administrators find that pursuing a joint degree will broaden a student’s horizon regardless.

“You definitely get a much more broad scope to your education,” said Jessica Chung, associate director of admissions at the Anderson School.

“You also have an opportunity to network with a much broader range of people,” Chung said.

At the School of Law, the most common joint degree for students to pursue along with their juris doctorate is a master’s in business administration from the Anderson school, said Pei Pei Tan, associate director of records at the School of Law.

Though she later clarified that there was no statistical evidence to support this claim, Tan said, “There can be a little bit of a difference in the performance between those simply pursuing a juris doctorate and those pursuing dual degrees with some bar pass rate being affected negatively.”

“It’s a hell of a lot of work,” Tan said.

Mokover also noticed some juris doctorate and master of business administration students struggling, who he believed did not go into the program for the right reasons. Entering the workforce with two graduate or professional degrees will not necessarily affect a person’s earning potential the same way entering the workforce will with a graduate degree instead of no graduate degree at all.

“You really have to make sure you’ve found the right niche for your skills before you decide to do it,” Mokover said.

“Think about why you want to get both of these degrees at the same time,” Chung said. “Because when we do evaluate these applications, we want to have a clear understanding of why the timing is right for the applicant to do a concurrent degree program.”

“There’s a common misconception out there. There’s no actual subset of jobs that require both degrees,” said Maciek Kolodziejczak, director of student services at the Department of Public Policy at UCLA.

“I always ask students whether or not they think they are going to recoup their pay. The masters in public policy students that graduate with a joint degree in law tend to go with law just because of the debt they have to pay,” Kolodziejczak said.

While the School of Public Affairs has many success stories of dual degree students, Kolodziejczak said he is not so sure that it is because of the actual degrees.

“If you’re skilled and you’re aggressive it would be hard to quantify whether success was because of the degrees alone,” Kolodziejczak said.

Still, many students, such as Daniel Karlin, a second-year medical student considering a joint degree in a masters of public health, feel that a dual degree contributes significantly to their abilities.

“A lot of the great ideas ““ really revolutionary ideas ““ come from the synthesis of other fields,” Karlin said.