Transcript

NICK ADAMS

I'm Nick Adams. And I'm on the Master's in Education. I'm on stage two of three, so it's 180 points. And I'm on the second 60 points of that. So I'm coming up to 120 points of study.

I suppose, initially, I thought having done an undergraduate degree in Biology and moving into Education that it would be not only a complete sea change, but a step up in terms of the level that would be expected of me, that I'd be expected to engage more with the primary literature, to go off and do my own searching, not necessarily to be given the materials that I would need to study, that I would need to go and find them myself. And actually, that was quite enjoyable when I first started because I wasn't just having to learn something that was prescribed. I actually had some scope to go off and find my own path through it, which was really interesting.

I was a little bit apprehensive to begin with that it may not have been supported that it would be a go off into the wilderness and you know you're on your own. But it really wasn't. It was just a case of here's some stuff to really give you a grounding in where you need to look and where you need to search, the kind of things that we're after, and then the skills to go off and do those kind of searches and to find the relevant material. So it was not as bad as I was originally thinking.

It'd been some years since I'd studied. So the volume of work was something that, when I initially came to, I was a bit unsure about.

I think when you're on undergraduate study, obviously, the intensity of the work, the level of detail that you might need to go into in being critical with the reading is not as great as when you're at the Master's level.

If you enjoyed doing your project, if you enjoyed that independent work when you were at undergraduate level, it's really an extension of that. You're given some more free rein to be independent in your studies when you go onto Master's level. And really, that's a big, big positive that you get to explore something that's fairly at the cutting edge of the research, of the literature and just to go for it really. It's not as bad as it sounds. It's a bit scary to think, well, I have to search all these materials through the library, and there's so much. It's so vast. But it really isn't as scary as it seems from the outset.

I began my Master's study because I wanted to formalise some of my Education knowledge and for career progression particularly. And it's helped me do that quite nicely. And it's set me up really to do some doctoral level study later on, which I'm quite looking forward to exploring.

So really, just think about where you want to go and what you want to do. And if it's for a career reason, it's absolutely brilliant.

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