As soon as I realized what a painful process it would be to apply for a masters I decided I had to write an article about it. So here I am, some…9 months later, finally done with my twelve applications to eight different universities. This is meant not just as some sort of warning, or preparation for those who need to do the same in the future, but also to raise awareness and call for a demand that something be done on national or global level to save students the time and misery.
Because, you know in many countries people call for skilled workers, and competition is high, so you need, and countries want that their people to be well-educated. People are encouraged to study in various ways, bursaries, models, good work etc…but then how come the system is so messed up?!!
I half-read an article by a friend, and I have heard from others that university is supposed to be the greatest part of studying because it’s when you specialize and only study what you’re interested in, but that bad, tired or too busy professors, bureaucracy and other things discourage many students. This thing with masters applications is just one more of those things that is SO discouraging! I would pretty much be able to say in my motivation letters that my ambition can be shown alone from having got so far in the system as to actually even apply for a masters. So here is what the process has been like:
Since there is no universal system to check what courses are taught where, I have to go through all universities one by one. I obviously only check the universities I could imagine myself going to, using the QS list as well as universities I have heard of. That’s a pretty long list...
Once I had decided where to apply and what for I had to write the applications themselves, since there is no universal application system, and the UK UCAS application system only applies to undergraduate studying. All the Universities require different things: usually a motivation letter (one University didn’t require that though), that should address different things depending on where you are applying. Two or sometimes only one reference with different methods of uploading/sending them. Copies of diplomas and transcript, or certified copies (meaning a copy of your diploma but with an original stamp; hard when you live in a different country from where you took your bachelor…). Additional questions. Sometimes CV. Some with an application fee.
Then universities across Europe have very varied deadlines (not to mention if you account for the US too, where I, because of the early deadlines, decided not to apply, plus because the costs of course…). The earliest deadline was in January, others in April, the latest being 1st of August, but most of them not having a deadline at all. This is all good and well, except for then you have to apply for scholarships as well, at least if you’re going to the UK. This is even worse because for every, not university, but for every degree you apply for, there are different scholarships, usually multiple ones and these all have different deadlines. So you might have a scholarship deadline for a degree that is before the degree deadline, if there even is one! Another problem with these deadlines being so far apart is that I had to give up my place to a University because they wanted my confirmation that I could not give because I was waiting for other Universities to give me an offer.
So basically…imagine a tree. One tree is a university. On that tree there are branches; they are the degrees. On the branches there are leaves, the leaves being the scholarships. Now imagine having eight trees – and then count the leaves on those eight trees. Then you might get what my life has felt like for the last 9 months.
Then imagine the leaves falling off: those are the deadlines. And as you know in autumn, no leaves fall at the same time. The branches fall even more seldom, because they only fall in storms or if they are cut off. That’s the deadline of the degree, if they exist at all.
OK the latter part of the metaphor is a bit harder to translate. So just to You might understand, with all those metaphorical leaves, why I did not apply for scholarships for all those twelve degrees. I only sent in three, two of which were for the same course. The biggest reason was because it was inhumane and impossible to handle so many scholarship applications and deadlines. Secondly, because of how messy the system is, I ended up making my university applications quite late and missed the scholarship deadlines. So now I’m really hoping to get those scholarships because otherwise I have just been accepted to so many universities without really having the money to go there (that’s not entirely true though because education in Denmark is free…but that’s the place I had to give up – so welcome to my life).
Anyway I want to end this essay with a final point: the system (or rather lack of it) is prejudiced against students like myself, who don’t know what they want to do in the future. I have always been a great student, with strong ambitions and good grades. I won the award for best student in my class in high school, plus an award for French. I scored a high first on my dissertation and have done a lot of extra-curricular activities. But despite my ambition, I just happen to be one of those unlucky people who have no idea in what direction I want to go, because I have different strings pulling me in different directions and for different reasons, and this has made the process many times harder than it would have been for a person who knew what they wanted to do. Because I needed to check all universities I could imagine going to, and go through their whole degree catalogue so see what interested me. I could not google anything, because I didn’t know what I was searching for. I used the QS list as a starting point, but then it would turn out that the University was useless in the area they were offering that appealed to me.
The system is easier for those who know where they want to go, regardless of whether they are excellent students like myself, or if they are just average. The tiresome process will still be in their favour, because they can just search whatever they want to study on google, because they know the name of their wanted degree, or approximately. They will see what universities come up. They can check on QS lists or other lists if that university is good with that particular subject, or the other way round.
My boyfriend always said that applying for his undergraduate was one of the worst periods in his life because of the stress, the personal statement coupled with studying for finals, but when he heard how incoherent postgraduate applications were, and how much frustration it has caused me – and I have not even been studying alongside! – he gladly (or well…sadly for my part) admitted that what I was going through was way beyond what we went through four years ago. If even just one country would harmonize the system, like UCAS extending their nationally British application system to postgraduate studying too, it would make life so much easier – and have saved me some 9 months of half-misery (half- because otherwise I would obviously be exaggerating; I have done other things than just this, but it would have been a full-time job to manage to do the scholarship applications too)!! Some countries seem to have a semi-national thing (the Netherlands and Sweden and Denmark too I think) but that’s only for contact details and to sort of click on what you are applying for. But then all documents have to be sent to the different universities and at different times plus the whole process above.
Anyway I’m done now. It’s said. And I hope that you people out there can learn from it and, even better, that someone can do something about it!! Because this is definitely not how you encourage people to study.
stress it: you need to have completed a University application before you can apply for a scholarship for it. Yet the deadline for the scholarship application is actually before the deadline for the university!!
Anyway I want to end this essay with a final point: the system (or rather lack of it) is prejudiced against students like myself, who don’t know what they want to do in the future. I have always been a great student, with strong ambitions and good grades. I won the award for best student in my class in high school, plus an award for French. I scored a high first on my dissertation and have done a lot of extra-curricular activities. But despite my ambition, I just happen to be one of those unlucky people who have no idea in what direction I want to go, because I have different strings pulling me in different directions and for different reasons, and this has made the process many times harder than it would have been for a person who knew what they wanted to do. Because I needed to check all universities I could imagine going to, and go through their whole degree catalogue so see what interested me. I could not google anything, because I didn’t know what I was searching for. I used the QS list as a starting point, but then it would turn out that the University was useless in the area they were offering that appealed to me. |
Anyway I’m done now. It’s said. And I hope that you people out there can learn from it and, even better, that someone can do something about it!! Because this is definitely not how you encourage people to study.