I appreciate your opinions everyone. I haven’t made a 100% decision yet, so any opinions and ideas are helpful. To be honest, I have never really thought about the degree, just about making a life at sea, mainly on tugs and OSV’s.
Very good points about the degrees, and quite applicable to someone your age. Good food for thought! More options now = more opportunities down the road.
camthrop,
I garentee if you go to SUNY maritime you will never feel like you missed the opportunity to start from the bottom! It’s the only maritime school where the number of hours spent behind a chipping hammer exceeds all other activities combined! Not to mention that you don’t have the right to smoke breaks and movie time like the average seaman.
As a Schuyler grad I am the first to admit it’s not a top school for book learning. Not that it’s the schools fault but it’s very hard to convince good professors to work in the bronx for a salary that barely meets the average rental prices. There are, of course, good professors who didn’t sign up to for the money but, with KP offering federal benefits, most of the good ones cross the river.
While the education was good, not great, I will say that since graduation I’ve never once hesitated to crawl through a bilge, climb the mast or stand a 12 hour watch. I’ll also go out on a limb and say anything I had not learned by graduation I taught myself the first 5 years on the job.
If starting from the bottom is your goal then go to SUNY, you won’t regret the decsion and you’ll have a college degree to fall back on if shipping ever dries up.
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]New3m,
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]I hate to burst your bubble but I know a few academy grads with Master’s degrees AND master’s licenses. They all got their masters degrees so they could get a cush desk job once the first kid started saying “daddy please don’t leave” but now they have kids they are all still sailing. These friends of mine are easy to pick out too, they are the ones holding back the tears as they say good bye to their kids and walking straight to the airport bathroom to cry in the privacy of a sH$#!er stall.
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]The fact is that a degree doesn’t get you a job, experience does. What experience in managing a shipping company will you get as a Chief Mate doing cargo ops? Sure companies will still hire you but at a level lower than that of the person who took a desk job right out of college.
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]The only way you can do it is if you put 40% of your salary directly into savings and prepare to swollow your pride… otherwise you will not be able to afford the pay cut needed to take an “entry level” job shoreside and your pride will make it difficult to take orders from a boss that’s younger than you who’s been sitting behind a desk their entire career.
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]Their is one other way… marry an amazing wife! A wife that doesn’t spend much money (or allow you too!) and gives her full support after you walk away from a $175k captain’s job offer to run a website that’s based off an advertising revenue model you learned in that masters class. A wife that knows you barely studied for that particular masters class. A wife who knows that no self respecting merchant mariner would ever click on a website’s advertisments regardless of how much time you spend making sure the advertiser’s product is actually usefull to them. A wife willing to eat ramen noodles and smart enough to find other ways for a website to make money!
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]I know because that’s my story!
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;](oh and I forgot… there is the “easy way” for you landlubbing cream puffs out there; Save yourself my headache and call a good headhunter that has developed relationships with shoreside HR managers… one that’s been to a maritime academy and can explain to an HR manager why hiring a Chief Mate is the best decision they’ll ever make. It’s as easy as clicking on the big green banner at the top of our blog page… I promise! 
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]-John
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]
<p style="font-size: 27px; line-height: 33.075px;]
New3m,
I hate to burst your bubble but I know a few academy grads with Master’s degrees AND master’s licenses. They all got their masters degrees so they could get a cush desk job once the first kid started saying “daddy please don’t leave” but now they have kids they are all still sailing. These friends of mine are easy to pick out too, they are the ones holding back the tears as they say good bye to their kids and walking straight to the airport bathroom to cry in the privacy of a sH$#!er stall.
The fact is that a degree doesn’t get you a job, experience does. What experience in managing a shipping company will you get as a Chief Mate doing cargo ops? Sure companies will still hire you but at a level lower than that of the person who took a desk job right out of college.
The only way you can do it is if you put 40% of your salary directly into savings and prepare to swallow your pride… otherwise you will not be able to afford the pay cut needed to take an “entry level” job shoreside and your pride will make it difficult to take orders from a boss that’s younger than you who’s been sitting behind a desk their entire career.
Their is one other way… marry an amazing wife! A wife that doesn’t spend much money (or allow you too!) and gives her full support after you walk away from a $175k captain’s job offer to run a website that’s based off an advertising revenue model you learned in that masters class. A wife that knows you barely studied for that particular masters class. A wife who knows that no self respecting merchant mariner would ever click on a website’s advertisements regardless of how much time you spend making sure the advertiser’s product is actually useful to them. A wife willing to eat ramen noodles and smart enough to find other ways for a website to make money!
I know because that’s my story!
(oh and I forgot… there is the “easy way” for you landlubbing cream puffs out there; Save yourself my headache and call a good headhunter that has developed relationships with shoreside HR managers… one that’s been to a maritime academy and can explain to an HR manager why hiring a Chief Mate is the best decision they’ll ever make. You won’t even need a master’s degree with this option and It’s as easy as clicking on the big green banner at the top of our blog page… I promise!
-John
Three cheers for John’s wife!!!
John,
Thanks for the input. I’m not sure how my life is going to turn out, or where I’m going to end up, but I’ll certainly keep what you said in mind.
Back to what you said about the advertising…can you explain how that works? I know you sell the space to some company (like the one with the big green logo), but do you get paid for every time somebody clicks on it from gcaptain? Or does it not matter?
New3M
From my understanding of internet advertising, there are a few ways of doing it.
One is to have a set price for the space whether it’s monthly or weekly. But everything is tracked, both impressions (everytime someone views the page the ad is on) and clicks on the ad itself. Obviously, advertisers are not going to keep paying if no one is clicking on the ads.
Another way is to charge per impression, say $20 per 1,000 impressions. This is also called CPM (cost per thousand where M is the roman numeral for 1000) and is used frequently to compare costs.
The third way is a pay-per-click. For the most part, that is how all the google ads work. So everytime someone here clicks on a google ad, John gets paid. Some of them actually pay really well.
I’m not sure how gCaptain does it, but from reading the ad section, they use the first option mentioned (and google adwords). So, I think what john is getting at is that he needs everyones support and start clicking on the advertisements throughout the site.
john:
I just read wht you posted bleow.
"…I hate to burst your bubble but I know a few academy grads with Master’s degrees AND master’s licenses. They all got their masters degrees so they could get a cush desk job once the first kid started saying “daddy please don’t leave” but now they have kids they are all still sailing. These friends of mine are easy to pick out too, they are the ones holding back the tears as they say good bye to their kids and walking straight to the airport bathroom to cry in the privacy of a sH$#!er stall…"
Thanks for writing that. That was a part not many men are willing to say but are probably like me who got totally blindsided when it happened. I didnt mind leaving my wife, infact, it was good to clear the air somtime. But leaving my daughter just toar my heart out. Thats somthing I NEVER considered cause it just came outa nowhere.
Then ya start thinking whats the sense of having a family if ya never get to see them. Then ya go out again cause ya got to pay the bills.
Youre obviously a good dad john.
Bob
I went and clicked on the big green banner you mentioned, I’m not really looking for a job but wanted to send a few cents to gCaptain.
I got a 404 message.
Me too.
Capt Ron, thanks for the info on the ads. I’m just wondering if every time I come on I should click on one of those banners a couple times to help john out.
As for leaving the kids, I had a professor who sailed as Chief Mate for a while. He said the same thing Bob did about leaving his wife - it wasn’t so bad. Even when his kids were little, it wasn’t so bad. But when his kids (he had 2 girls) got to the age where they realized where Dad was going and started crying at the airport, he was done. One more trip, and he came shoreside.
Oh, I get a 404 on the Fastream ad too.
I quit sailing and went shoreside when my kids were 4 and 7. It was just too hard on them and on me. Now they’re grown up, and I’m back at it. It was well worth the sacrifice. Their mom didn’t stick around but my present wife is just fine with my being gone. Homecoming is always special!
New3m,
Glad you asked the answer is no… don’t wory about clicking on ads each visit. Here’s why:
We basically make money in two ways. The first is advertising. We have two types of ads, ones sold through the google ad network (If you’re logged out you will see it just below the USCGQ banner) and those we sell directly to maritime companies through our advertising micro site. The google ads are pay-per-click, so each click our visitors make on them brings us a few cents. The google ads are targeted to the content so if the discussion is about flashlights you might see an ad from pelican. Google runs it very similar to ebay, meaning advertisers pick which site they want to advertise on and what keywords they want to bid on (flashlights, maritime jobs, maritime training) then the advertisers set their target bids. In this thread we talked about online Master’s Degree so google is currently showing an ad for the University Of Phoenix. Google ads bring in a very low amount of money per ad but since we serve over a quarter million pages every month the cents add up to a decent amount of money.
The other type of ads we sell are direct to maritime companies. These ads are bought on a for a set period of time and each one sells for a few thousand a month but they do not compete or rotate through. KVH sattelite is the first advertiser that has made a significant investment in the forum, visitors will see there ad at the top of every page. These ads are not pay-per-click, although some (like faststream) do track clickthroughs, they are pay-per-conversion. This means we need to drive sales. Each company has a different idea on what a sale means.
So if you, New3m specifically, clicked every google ad you found this week we might make $10… i.e. not enough that it’s worth yours or my time (we’d rather let you spend your time posting comments which bring interest to new and existing members). If you clicked on KVH’s banner or even bought a satellite dish from them we would not make a dime today but we may be able to sell them a bigger package next month. What happens is that the marketing department gets a report stating something like: “gCaptain Visitors viewed the ad 90,000 times last month, 400 of those people clicked on the banner, 25 of them filled out the form on the landing page, 5 of them called us mentioning gCaptain and we sold 2 dish systems”. The higher numbers are important to building brand awareness but the smaller numbers are important for building revenue. So basically if every forum member took the time to visit KVH’s site, filled out the form and sent an email to their fleet managers asking them to call KVH… we’d be smiling.
The second way we make money is consulting on internet projects. We have alreadybuilt a few websites for clients and we also help companies rank higher in google… but that’s a hard sell. Advertising is, however, the preferred method since the less time we ned to spend consulting the more time we have to work on forum upgrades and bug fixes.
One other note… content matters. I’m not sure if it’s Anchorman’s good looks or Capt_A’s charming personality but they like something about you guys!
Thanks for the Fastream heads up guys! We installed a new chache server last night.
Anchorman really isn’t that good looking, but I hear he is hung like a mouse!
Ooo…so is that how I ended up on Marine Money’s email address list???
Your on Marine Money’s email list?? Did you sign up for it on their page? We don’t share any of our email lists, not even with clients.
I don’t know how I got on it…but I get a bunch of their emails. No biggie - I didn’t think you did it, just though it was ironic that you designed their site too.
Capt.Lee- Are you still mad at me for teabagging your mouthwash bottle?
Why would I be mad…I gave that mouthwash to Jeff H.