Foreign Perspectives

Two years back when I went to the PG open day at Queen’s it seemed that I had found the masters I’d been looking for but unfortunately it seemed to only be a runner as a full-time degree and I couldn’t do that. So, I shelved the idea.

However, thanks to the voluntary redundancy scheme that the NI public sector is kicking off next week, it looks like the masters is a reasonable possibility. Normally, I guess most people would consider a redundancy programme as a bad thing, but in this case there appear to be a number of people including me who find that it’s actually a good thing. Surprisingly, Wendy has been all for me going for it and also thinks that using a year to do the masters would be a good thing too.

So, I find myself with the application typed up and off to Queen’s this morning.  It’s one of the all online ones and doesn’t really allow for us OU people so for my second referee, I’ve see_above@open.ac.uk as the science SST are getting the two references sorted for me. Also doesn’t allow for those of us with more than one UG degree which I guess takes in a fair number of OU students too. Despite all the business of “personal statements” that degree courses seem to ask for, there was just an “additional information” box to complete so no flowery personal statement required. Thus the personal statement that I’d been mulling over for the last two years was quite short in the end and basically said that I got hooked on biology four years back, loved the way that just about every week over that time came up with something fascinating and I’d love to continue that with the masters.

On other fronts, I heard back from the psychology SST people and it appears that I can complete the psychology degree by doing just two more courses which is what I thought might be possible. Mind you, it does introduce the complication that those courses need to be completed by 2017 so, if I get to do the masters, it means running one of those courses alongside it.