Choosing to study a master’s degree can be a great investment in yourself and your future. While some choose postgraduate education to gain a competitive edge, others choose to specialise in their field, change career, or even study their favourite subject in more depth.
These are all great options, but choosing from thousands of programmes across many top-ranked institutions can be a difficult feat. How do you know you’re making the right decision which will bring you the greatest opportunities in your future?
After graduating from my undergraduate degree in environment and business, I found it challenging to figure out what to do for a master's, and had many questions and concerns. It took thorough research to find my right fit, but here’s what I learned from the process:
1. Identify your goals
The first and most important step is to identify what you want to achieve from a master’s programme. Ask yourself where you see yourself in five years, what kind of career you think you want to go into, and what subjects really capture your interest.
I found it helpful to get a big piece of paper and write down everything I could think of about my aspirations. When writing down the careers I was interested in, I asked myself why I thought those jobs would be exciting and wrote that down too. This helped me to gain clarity on my purpose and to understand what that intuition and excitement feels like.
From there, I researched degree programmes extensively and cross-referenced the course content with my goals. I also looked to see if programmes are widely accepted within the industries I was interested in and found some differences where certain qualifications were more advantageous than others.
2. Speak to universities for a better perspective
Whether you attend postgraduate open days, online webinars or simply reach out via email, try and speak to academics, admissions teams, programme leaders and students from each of the programmes you’re interested in.
You’ll gain a much better perspective on the benefits of studying the degree, what the university is looking for in its candidates and what it’s really like to study the subject.
It’s helpful to create an Excel sheet of the criteria you’re looking for, to formulate questions for each university. The most important ones for me were the diversity of the student population and acceptance rate of international students, the location of the campus, the university’s ranking, class size, options to study virtually or part-time, scholarship opportunities, class profile, the duration of the programme and the cost.
I can recommend using Reddit to post questions for staff and students at each university. This often provided me with more personalised responses. YouTube is also a great place to watch videos current students have made.
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