Robert Forto

Midlife in College

Week 105 of 186 (BMAL 780)

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Week 105 of approximately 186 are in the books in my doctorate program.

It is the start of a new week, a new course, and a new term at Liberty in the Doctor of Strategic Leadership program. This course is Strategic Leadership in the 21st Century (BMAL 780) and is the last core course in the program for me. This week I also took a big step and enrolled in the first of the project/dissertation courses, BMAL 780 which is where we start to develop our research project.

With so many things going on in the next few months I decided to take the course in the D term (late October) so it will be the first time since 2014 that I have had a break of more than three months! It’s good because once I start the final batch of courses I have to be continually enrolled until I am finished.

The new course should be interesting. We are back to studying leadership and our assignment is a 5-page research paper on the Need for Training Future Leaders. Of course, I used my own two companies as a case study.

The course is pretty heavy on writing. We have a few of these research papers, a discussion and replies each week, two annotated bibliographies, and a lit review.

Join host Michele Forto as she starts her brand new podcast, Wellness Wednesdays. Please give it a listen and leave an honest review wherever you download your podcasts.

Oh, if you are on Twitter, I highly encourage you to follow the hashtags, #AcademicChatter and #AcademicTwitter both are great threads with advice, motivation, and a very supportive community and if you wouldn’t mind, give me a follow at @robertforto and send me a tweet letting me know you found my blog helpful!

Score: 101/103

To read the paper:

Forto 780 Research Paper 1

 

Week 104 of 186 (BMAL 770)

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Week 104 of approximately 186 are in the books in my doctorate program.

We are in the home stretch and the last week of the current class, Business Ethics. No rest for the wicked because a new class starts right on its heels next Monday.

For this week we only have a discussion post and the required four replies. That may not sound like much but our post is due on Thursday and the replies are due on Friday since week 8 is always a short week.

Join host Michele Forto as she starts her brand new podcast, Wellness Wednesdays. Please give it a listen and leave an honest review wherever you download your podcasts.

Oh, if you are on Twitter, I highly encourage you to follow the hashtags, #AcademicChatter and #AcademicTwitter both are great threads with advice, motivation, and a very supportive community and if you wouldn’t mind, give me a follow at @robertforto and send me a tweet letting me know you found my blog helpful!

Score: 120/125

Final Grade: A

To read the paper:

forto reserach paper

 

Week 103 of 186 (BMAL 770)

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Week 103 of approximately 186 are in the books in my doctorate program.

It was a long week of writing. We had our big research paper due and I ended up spending about 15 hours on it for 18 pages and 11 sources. I always tend to go above and beyond with the research and citation as this instructor is a bit of a stickler for every single thing properly sourced.

I think I did a pretty good job. Now to wait and see!

Join host Michele Forto as she starts her brand new podcast, Wellness Wednesdays. Please give it a listen and leave an honest review wherever you download your podcasts.

Oh, if you are on Twitter, I highly encourage you to follow the hashtags, #AcademicChatter and #AcademicTwitter both are great threads with advice, motivation, and a very supportive community and if you wouldn’t mind, give me a follow at @robertforto and send me a tweet letting me know you found my blog helpful!

Score: */140

To read the paper:

Paper will be uploaded later this week

 

Week 102 of 186 (BMAL 770)

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Week 101 of approximately 186 are in the books in my doctorate program.

It was an interesting week this week in BMAL 770 we had to write a critique of a critique from one of our peers in the course. This was the first time I have ever done this and it was a good exercise in learning how to be somewhat restrained.

It is hard to believe we are already heading into the final two weeks of this course and I have just one more course before the fun really starts in the fall as I begin my project.

Join host Michele Forto as she starts her brand new podcast, Wellness Wednesdays. Please give it a listen and leave an honest review wherever you download your podcasts.

Oh, if you are on Twitter, I highly encourage you to follow the hashtags, #AcademicChatter and #AcademicTwitter both are great threads with advice, motivation, and a very supportive community and if you wouldn’t mind, give me a follow at @robertforto and send me a tweet letting me know you found my blog helpful!

Also, my wife Michele is getting deep into her Master’s program as well and getting close to the finish line! Please do me a favor and follow her over on LinkedIn. This week she is doing a mock-up Winter Olympics proposal for Anchorage, Alaska. Whoever said grad school was boring!

Score: */40

To read the paper:

Paper will be uploaded later in the week, please check back.

 

Week 101 of 186 (BMAL 770)

by Leave a Comment

Week 101 of approximately 186 are in the books in my doctorate program.

It was a heavy writing week for BMAL 770 Business Ethics. We had to do a critique of a scholarly paper that is less than five years old from one particular journal. After more than four hours of searching, I finally found one that was interesting to me and met all of the criteria. It is sometimes difficult to critique another scholar’s work when it has already gone through a rigorous editing and peer-reviewed process. Nevertheless, I found a couple of points I could hammer home and hopefully it doesn’t make me look too critical. In a doctorate program, you have to learn how to straddle the fine line between opinion and bias.

Also this week my two podcast hosts and I dove deep and recorded an episode that discusses the hero’s journey as it pertains to character development and organizational change through the lens of the 1985 Rocky IV movie. It was a fun project and will drop in a couple of weeks and I will embed it on a future blog post.

Join hosts Robert Forto, TJ Miller, and Michele Forto as they discuss the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team on the Peak Experience podcast

Oh, if you are on Twitter, I highly encourage you to follow the hashtags, #AcademicChatter and #AcademicTwitter both are great threads with advice, motivation, and a very supportive community and if you wouldn’t mind, give me a follow at @robertforto and send me a tweet letting me know you found my blog helpful!

Also, my wife Michele is getting deep into her Master’s program as well and getting close to the finish line! Please do me a favor and follow her over on LinkedIn. This week she is doing a mock-up Winter Olympics proposal for Anchorage, Alaska. Whoever said grad school was boring!

Score: 71/75

To read the paper:

Forto article critique