Norwich's MMH program was by far the most difficult academic program I've been through, from an undergrad in history from Saint Anselm College to the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Warfare School and Command and Staff programs. And it's by far the most valuable... Read More academic education I've yet received. It was worth every dime and then some. From start to finish I felt taken care of by the administrative staff and most importantly, taught by the instructors. Even after I finished, I've stayed in touch with some of my instructors and they have been selfless in helping me forward in my post-graduate efforts. The admissions staff was very helpful and responsive throughout the application process, especially working the additional nuance of tuition payments with the Post-9/11 GI Bill. I had zero problems with payments and stipends. Ben and Tara of the admissions office responded almost immediately to all my questions; I was applying while getting reassigned across country and regardless of time zone, they were ready to assist. Once enrolled I found the instructors of generally high quality. In retrospect it's pretty remarkable just how much talent Norwich's online program is able to garner. Dr. Broom did the introduction to historiography. This is an admittedly dry course, focusing less on history itself than the tools of the historian. But it has to be gotten through so that you understand how to do all the research required in the following courses and I think Dr. Broom did a good job with the material to ensure all new students are aware of the many tools available and have at least some familiarity with using them. I had Dr. Dmitriev for the Global Military History survey course. This was a fairly unremarkable survey course, a mile wide and inch deep, but was useful for giving me some background in areas of military history I was less familiar with, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. I had Dr. Oliviero for Military Thought and Theory. Clearly some of the other students here were not fans, and I will freely admit he is not one to suffer fools lightly. I think we had about a 50% attrition rate in my cohort through his class. Yet I never found him unfair, or insufficiently clear in his standards. Maybe as a Marine I'm more inured to tough love than others, but his critiques left no doubt where he thought you fell short in your analysis. But if you take it as intended - criticism designed to make you better, and prepare you for the harder critique that will come on your capstone -it was incredibly valuable feedback. In fact, thanks to his mentoring, I used the final 15-page paper I wrote for his course as the bedrock of my capstone paper, and following graduation, as an article for the Marine Corps Gazette. Moreover - and I caution that I speak anecdotally here, only from my own experience and cohort - the people who dropped out of his class after a few weeks were ones whose discussion responses indicated they felt they only needed to show up to pass. Dr. Oliviero called out several of them for poor or lazy writing, lack of citations or bad citation format, or arguments that didn't answer the question asked. I'd submit that, by the third graduate course of a master's program, writing, citations, and arguments should be pretty tight for all students involved. Dr. David Ulbrich instructed both my course on amphibious warfare and supervised my final capstone project. I learned more about the utterly fascinating history of amphibious warfare in those ten weeks than I had in years of Marine Corps "professional military education." And when it came to my capstone, Dr. Ulbrich - though not personally familiar with my chosen topic - nevertheless had extensive experience in doing research using Marine Corps resources, which would be key to my work. He shared his experiences freely and pointed me in several directions I never would have discovered on my own. With his mentorship, my final capstone wound up winning the "Outstanding Capstone" award for MMH in my graduating class. But his mentorship went beyond that. He also tried to get all of his students more involved in their chosen discipline by pointing them toward academic conferences and competitions. His encouragement made me submit a paper to the Missouri Valley History Conference, and to VMI's Cold War essay contest, neither of which I'd never have considered by myself. Additionally, as I've continued postgraduate writing projects, he's always been free with feedback and peer review, and even invited me to collaborate on a supplement to his "Ways of War" textbook series. If you show interest in digging deeper in the military history discipline, he will help you succeed long after you've left the Norwich program. Going back to Dr. Oliviero: his rigor didn't only pay off for me during my capstone process. Thanks to the standards he enforced, along with his vast knowledge of history and theory, I got my capstone paper picked up for revision as a book from Marine Corps University Press, a completely unexpected turn of events that I could not have imagined when I wrote the first 15-page paper on the topic for him. That book, with all the research and editing that went into it, was a direct reflection of his unwillingness to give weak work a pass, as well as the overall strength of instruction from all my Norwich courses. Norwich's program has taken me places I never thought I would go, and the writing and research I did throughout those 18 months has continued to pay dividends despite the fact that the MMH program is now several years in my rear view mirror. It is not easy, but I fully believe I got my money's worth from the MMH program and would enthusiastically recommend it to anyone looking for a challenging and rewarding history program.
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