How an Astronomer Ended up in the Shidler DLEMBA Program

The following is an computer-generated summary of the video transcript.

I'm Scott Kleinman, I am the associate director for development at Joan Observatory and part of the 2014 graduating DLEMBA class. So I realized through my career in astronomy that I've been basically practicing management without a license for a number of years. And I decided that I wanted to learn sort of how management is really done. I've been trained in astronomy and building instrumentation, a lot of technical work, but by and large astronomers aren't trained in management and I saw that there were errors that we could probably do better. So I started looking around to see where are the programs that I could go while still maintaining my existing job. And there are a few that are available that are completely remote, which didn't offer the sort of ability to meet students and instructors face to face. And some that really required you to relocate our at least many weekends go to the mainland or someplace else. So none of those quite really quite worked for me. The UH Manoa program, the DLMBAProgram was exactly what Iended up needing because it did give me both the ability to keep my job here working remotely but also established the face to face connection with other students. So I was actually curious before I started the program whether this would actually be of value to me. It was, it was kind of an experiment astronomers don't normally, most of our, our managers um are not trained to management. So it was kind of experiment to see because it's really gonna be valuable. And I can say that with the exception of maybe statistics because astronomers are pretty well versed in statistics, every class I took, I was able to apply in real time was something I was working on uh, in myday job. So not only was able to do it, you know, as I was going along in each class, which I was really kind of surprised that um, a lot of those techniques have sort of carried over. One of the examples I remember was we had some discussion with our Chief Financial Officer who was speaking accountant language, trying to explain something and the scientists in the room didn't understand what he was talking about and they were asking questions and he didn't understand what they were asking about. I was actually in the unique position that I could speak both accountant language and astronomer language and being able to bridge that gap.