do you think its a bit tight?

Poppy9

debrag wrote: »

You can hardly live on it now. Your kid will grow up, want things etc

like food:rolleyes:

SingleSue

lkmc01 wrote: »

I'm looking forward to my masters, will have a strong relevant highly topical and useful masters with gained work experience and contacts, a loving great partner, a good house deposit, and a beautiful child, which is more than alot of people have achived in their life. goodnight

Well if you look at my life now you would think I have not really achieved much in my life (divorced, living in social housing and having a role as a carer) but I have the satisfaction of knowing my children are well grounded, have a healthy attitude to education and money and don't believe the world owes them a start in life.

I left school at 16, not because I was too daft to stay on but because I was too impatient and wanted to be out in the big wide world (my biggest mistake I now realise) and earning money. At the time it didn't really matter, qualifications just didn't seem to come into the equation with employers and I did ok...no in fact, I did blooming well, reaching management level in my career after starting at the bottom and earning well over the average salary for the time (I was a higher rate tax payer).

There are other things in life that give you your stock as a person, not just if you have a masters or a degree and looking down on those who don't possess those things is something I always find a little eek, there are some incredibly intelligent people out there who, for one reason or another, never went any further than High School.

I am doing my degree for a few reasons, one is to help improve my chances of having a better job once my care duties have eased, another is to keep my brain busy...I can't sleep unless it is busy and filled with facts, one of the reasons I have been combining two courses at once alongside rushing around to appointments, meeting with schools, partaking in the therapy for my children and running a team of over 60 people on a very busy live results website to make sure they are where they should be, when they should be!

Cissi

lkmc01 wrote: »

I'm looking forward to my masters, will have a strong relevant highly topical and useful masters with gained work experience and contacts, a loving great partner, a good house deposit, and a beautiful child, which is more than alot of people have achived in their life. goodnight

It's great that you're happy with the things that you do have, and well done on your supportive DH and beautiful child However financially you're completely deluding yourself. No, you won't have "a good house deposit" - you've already stated that it's the money left from your student loan! No bank will count that as a deposit, furthermore they'll take the existing debt into account when offering you a mortgage.

By all means do the course since it seems important to you from a personal fulfilment point of view - but be careful that you don't put your family under too much strain in the process! The suggestion of doing it over 2 years and get a part-time job with a relevant company seem like the only sensible one. Since you won't listen to this I suspect that there is something else going on - have you perhaps tried and failed already to find such a placement? If so I'd be even more worried about your future prospects.

alenax

This thread brings the lolz. At first I thought it was genuinely asking for advice but this seems to be a person that just wants to be told what s/he wants to hear and to insult, and argue with, people who have tried to give advice. But I do agree with what someone said about feeding the troll so I'll leave it there

Dinah93

My lecturers (who lets face it recruit for the university to bring in money, no students doing their course, no job for them) told me there was a huge shortage of town planners. I signed up on that basis. When I graduated (market still very much on the rise, lots of jobs going) of my group of 12 friends only 3 of us went into jobs. There were indeed lots of jobs, but there were a heck of a lot more people chasing them! All 3 had been working part time in the industry alongside the full-time course. A year later an additional 2 had got a job in planning, but on admin/technician positions, which are less than 16k. I should point out that all of us who actuall got jobs at the level we want have 1sts or a 2.1 in my case (0.7% off a 1st, very annoying!), and even the two on technicians jobs had 2.1s. The MSc would take you with a 2.2, but the rate of actually getting jobs in a professional field at the end is very, very low without relevant work experience not generously provided for you so you don't actually have to make any effort yourself. Work experience should be in addition to the course, not as part of it. Any work experience as part of the course is taking away from actual study time, hence why it's pitched at a poly crowd rather than those capable of getting the grades required at a traditional respected university.

bandraoi

I've been working as a sustainability consultant for three years, or rather I was until I got laid off. Most of the work in the field is in very specialised consultancies and the construction industry (mechanical and electrical engineering)

There are very very few jobs in the field you're interested in. In companies of several thousand people there's one person based in head office. There are some small consultancies, which are based around the CVs of one or two lead consultants and typically some admin staff. They are brought in on specific issues.

The masters you're doing, international resources and climate care, won't get you anywhere for actual jobs. Sure it's a nice title, but for things like carbon reduction calculations what they're looking for is highly numerate graduates who can crunch numbers and run spreadsheets all day. Environmental scientists, environmental engineers and mech and elec people with a masters in what you're doing. You need to be an expert in water, waste, energy, ecology or something specific to get into climate care.

The sort of jobs going in the field aren't for graduates. They're for people who've worked 10-15 years in a technical role and then do a masters or further study. They're an expert in something, and they choose to apply that expertise to the environmental arena. These people are then coupled with people from HR/marketing/publicity backgrounds to give the company a good image.