On the Seam: Working Drafts · July 2026
What the Doctorate Actually Taught Me
I finished a doctorate at 50. The why is more interesting than the diploma itself — and most of what I actually learned had nothing to do with the dissertation.
I finished a doctorate at 50. I want to write about why, because the why is more interesting than the diploma itself, and because most of what I actually learned had nothing to do with the dissertation.
The real reason came first, and it was small.
I wanted to prove to myself that I could. Not to Google, not to a search committee, not to anyone reading a resume. To myself. My path here hasn't been linear — I came up through the Air Force before I came up through anything else, and I spent a long stretch of my career being the person in the room without the degree the room assumed you'd have. That's not the subject of this post. But it's the reason the order of everything below matters to me. People who chase a credential for what it signals to others tend to stop the moment the signaling stops working. I needed the thing to be true on the inside first.
It took me over twenty years to get a bachelor's degree.
I started one path, life happened, and the degree sat unfinished for two decades. When I finally went back, I went through Western Governors University — a nonprofit, regionally accredited school built on competency-based education instead of the semester model. WGU doesn't sell you seat time. You prove mastery of a competency, and you move to the next one. I completed 26 courses in under five months. Then I did the MBA in seven.
That pace tells you something about the model, not about me. WGU strips out the artificial pacing that traditional programs impose and replaces it with a simple question: do you actually know this or not? For someone twenty years removed from a classroom, carrying a full-time job the entire way, that model was the only door that was actually open. It's regionally accredited by NWCCU, the same tier as SACSCOC or the Middle States schools, and it worked exactly as advertised. But it didn't, by itself, answer the question I actually cared about most: whether I could survive something harder — a brick-and-mortar doctoral program, on a fixed cohort schedule, with faculty who didn't care how fast I could move, while still working full time at Google.
So I picked Drexel on purpose, not by default.
I chose Drexel LeBow's Executive DBA deliberately, and I chose it for three features most people don't think to ask about: the calendar, the cohort, and the chair.
The calendar and the cohort came first. Drexel runs the program on a quarter system, lockstep, ten consecutive quarters, with a fixed group of peers moving through it together. I didn't want to self-pace my way through a doctorate the way I'd self-paced my way through the bachelor's. I wanted a room full of people going through the same exhaustion at the same time.
That cohort turned out to be the closest thing I'd felt to my old unit since I left the Air Force. Different backgrounds, different industries, different reasons for being there — but everyone pointed at the same finish line, everyone taking turns carrying someone else's weight when theirs got too heavy for a quarter. You learn as much from the person next to you in a cohort as you do from the faculty. I didn't expect that. I expected rigor. I got rigor and I also got something closer to fellowship, and I don't think I'd have finished without both.
The third feature was the one I'm least likely to have admitted out loud at the time: I wanted to work with Dr. David Gefen. If you spend any time in information systems research, you know the name. He is one of the most cited scholars in the field — decades of foundational work on trust in technology, on how people decide whether to rely on systems they can't fully see inside. That is not adjacent to what I wanted to study. It is exactly what I wanted to study. My whole question — what makes people trust, distrust, and ultimately advocate for AI — sits directly on top of the ground he spent a career mapping. Choosing Drexel meant the possibility of having that person read my work and tell me where it was thin. You do not get many chances to be argued with by someone who helped build the field you're trying to contribute to. I picked the program in part to earn that.
He became my dissertation chair, and it mattered more than the accreditation line on the diploma. A chair isn't a supervisor signing off on milestones. A chair is the person who decides whether your thinking is good enough to stand in front of a committee, and Gefen held that line without flinching. He pushed on the theory until it either held or broke, and when it broke he made me sit with the break instead of papering over it. Most of what I now believe about trust and distrust under autonomy — the argument I'm still writing my way through in this newsletter — started as something he made me defend and I couldn't, not yet. That's the value of the right chair. He didn't hand me conclusions. He made my questions harder, and the research is better for it.
I also wanted the accreditation to be unambiguous. LeBow sits in the top 20 percent of business schools worldwide holding AACSB accreditation — a distinction closer to 5 percent of schools globally hold at LeBow's level. I didn't need anyone to take my word for the program. I needed the program to not require anyone to take my word for it.
I looked at the executive certificate path, and I turned away from it.
Before Drexel, I considered the executive credential route — the kind of program MIT, Wharton, and similar schools run for senior leaders. I could see the appeal: shorter timeline, brand-name letterhead, less risk. I could also see exactly what it would have been for me — a patch, a way to put a recognizable name on top of the WGU degrees without doing anything that actually stretched me the same way. I wanted something real. A credential that put me in a cohort, made me defend a dissertation in front of people qualified to tell me it was wrong, and left me having actually built new knowledge instead of having attended a well-branded seminar.
The biggest lesson wasn't that I could do it. It was that it's okay to be wrong.
I spent most of my career working hard to be right — careful with my point of view, careful to have conviction, careful to never get caught flat. The doctorate broke that habit, and it broke it on purpose.
Dr. Gefen said something early on that I've carried since: the goal was never to be right. It was to know a little more about something than I knew before. Scholars are wrong far more often than they're right — that's what a null result is, that's what most of the literature is, a long record of careful people being wrong in useful ways. There's a running joke in doctoral programs: undergrads think they know everything, master's students know one thing well, and doctoral students finally understand how much they don't know. I lived that joke. My own dissertation produced results I didn't expect and hypotheses that didn't hold, and the discipline was to sit with that instead of forcing it into the shape I'd walked in with.
That's the actual reason this newsletter is called Working Drafts. It isn't a hedge — a soft way of saying “don't hold me to this.” It's the posture I built in that program, and it's a better way to think than the one I had before. I'm going to be wrong here sometimes. I'll pivot when I learn something that doesn't fit what I published last week. That used to feel like a weakness to manage. Now it's the whole method.
What I actually learned wasn't in the curriculum.
The methodology, the statistics, the theory — all of it mattered, and none of it is the point of this post. The real lesson was about sequencing motives correctly, picking a model that matched the gap I was actually trying to close instead of the one that was fastest, and learning — late, and the hard way — that conviction and correctness aren't the same thing, and that the second one isn't the goal anyway.
Twenty years between the start of a bachelor's and the finish of a doctorate isn't a tidy narrative. It's a long one, with a genuinely fast middle and a genuinely slow beginning, and I don't think it would have worked in any other order. The years the degree sat unfinished weren't wasted — they were the years I was becoming someone who'd actually need the doctorate to say something true, instead of someone collecting one to say something impressive.
The views expressed here are entirely my own and do not represent the policy or position of my employer or any customer.