Big news! I am officially a college student again. (For, like, a fourth time.)
In furtherance of my education, I have officially started back to school. I'm enrolling into Colorado Technical University's Bachelor's in Business Administration program. They allow up to three concentration for this program, so I'm naturally going for three concentrations: Finance, Business Development, and Project Management.
This clearly doesn't further my clinical education, nor does it make me a better educator, so why am I going this route? There are several reasons, but I'm going to try to hit the highlights.
1. To develop entrepreneurial skills
As noted in my homestead update, purchasing a sawmill has moved from "strong consideration" to "the decided course of action." The sawmill, as a part of the homestead, is meant to be a means of generating an alternative income stream. It's the first of several. Since discussing it in the homestead article, I have spoken to a couple of friends that work as arborists, and I now have a potential source of wood to mill and sell, and if I keep the mill portable, I can do mill-for-hire projects.
There are two other projects on the back burners as alternative income streams. My local Community Paramedic program has encountered a problem of transportation for the patient enrolled in their program. Because my local program is so rural, their patients aren't covered under many of the ride share programs that contract for such transports, which yields a unique underserved market that I could potentially jump into.
The last of my projects for alternative income streams is real estate. It is a goal of my financial plan to invest in some real estate as a rental property.
With all three of these projects, it would be a huge boon to have business management skills from financing, toe marketing, to development. I have an entrepreneurial spirit, but without a skillset and knowledge to take these ideas and implement them, these ideas will be nothing more than ideas. My highest priority is to provide and care for my family, so it is imperative that these ideas be given substance. Having secured the financial wellbeing of my family, I can afford to venture out into other areas, such as possibly going into teaching full time.
2. To develop management skills
Similar to the entrepreneurial skills, I have some academic/educational interests that require much of the same skill set.
As readers may have noted, I have recently taken an interest in my personal finances (see above about family's financial wellbeing). During this road to financial literacy, I've begun to notice a dearth of that literacy amongst many of the general population. So, I've begun plotting a financial education... thing. It's not fleshed out, obviously. I've considered making it an ongoing online class. I don't know how I feel about a seminar. However, my goal is to find ways of connecting people with information so as to increase their financial literacy. I believe true financial literacy could help stimulate some change in the financial landscape. With the looming recession, it's becoming all the more imperative that this information be broadcast to people.
A similar academic pursuit is an academic body of paramedics to drive paramedic integration into research, to drive advancements in the field, and to give paramedics a voice at self-direction of their field. There are no true academic bodies that recognize and reward paramedics for their contributions to their own field, that are considered authorities on their own subject matter, and that have some semblance of self-governance. There are many associations out there, and many have aspects that I like, but none have everything together in one place.
3. To learn and explore more areas of knowledge
I know a bit about prehospital medicine. What I don't know about is hardly anything in the business world beyond my short time trying to run my own gun store. I know full well that there is a whole wide world of business and management that I haven't tapped into yet, and much of the knowledge might easily influence other aspects of my professional life. It may turn out that I find a new challenge that I enjoy, and it could start me off on a new adventure. I'm not saying that it will or it won't. What I am saying is that there's an element of the unknown in this new field, and that, in my own way, I'm pioneering new areas of education for myself. Who knows what kind of opportunities lie on the other side?
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