Oh, Yahoo!.  Just when you think they couldn’t do anything dumber, they do.  It turns out that their newly-minted CEO, Scott Thompson, doesn’t have the degree that he claims to have.  He said he’s got a CS degree, when he’s actually got an accounting degree.  Yahoo! claims that this is an inadvertent error, except this so-called “inadvertent error” can also be found on his eBay bio from his days leading PayPal.

Own your degree.  Be proud of it.  My MS is in technical communication, and I’m clear about it on both my about page here as well as on my LinkedIn profile.  I can tell you why I got that degree¹, but the fact of the matter is that it’s what my degree is.  In various interviews over the years, I’ve had to explain why my degree is technical communications instead of HCI or design or computer science or software engineering.  But that’s the degree that I got, and I’ve got to be proud of it.  There are things that I learned in my degree that are immensely useful, even if I was cranky about taking them at the time.  A course about how to edit technical content was one of those courses — given how much I have to write now, as well as edit work from others, this course has long since proven its worth.

There comes a point in your career where your experience and your accomplishments matter much more than your degree.  So don’t lie about your degree.  Own it.  Be proud of it, and be able to explain how it sets you apart from your competition who have a degree that’s more traditional to your field.