Choosing a University for Your Master's Degree, Part II

In a previous article, I discussed my personal experience in choosing a graduate school. I went overseas to Glasgow, Scotland, to get my master's degree, and I got a good education and had an even better time just living in another country for a year.

I mentioned that I didn't have much of a difficult time finding an employer who would accept my master's degree from a Scottish university. However, I didn't mention that I was not really looking to teach in a college or university with my degree. Most of my job search was in the nonprofit field or in government/public service.

Some community colleges will hire teachers that only have master's degrees, and one might be able to find an assistant to a professor or some similar position at a university with a master's degree. For the community college positions that I did apply for, I found that it was difficult to calculate the number of graduate hours that I had actually accumulated in my graduate studies. It was necessary to know this number to be able to fulfill the job requirements of the teaching position.

My degree is in Development Studies. No one knows what that is, exactly. I'm still not completely sure that I do. I can't teach Anthropology, Sociology, or International Development because I may have only taken one or two courses in each of these disciplines during my graduate studies. Basically, my degree is so broad that it disqualifies me from teaching anything specific here in the States.

If a person studies something very specific during their time at a university overseas, I would imagine that he or she could work with the human resources department to figure out how many hours of graduate study that person actually has in a specific area of study. It shouldn't be too hard to at least closely approximate. Graduate programs are structured so differently that "hours" of study doesn't really mean much when one is earning a graduate degree in another country. This doesn't mean that the level of rigor of the course is any higher or lower, but it does mean that figuring out how many or how much of something a person studied can be a bit tricky.

So, if you are debating which type of program to pursue for your graduate studies here in the States or overseas, be sure that you know exactly what you will learn from you program. Will you end up with just another liberal arts degree that is not really useless, but just not very specific? You may know how to critically solve a problem because you wrote a great thesis, but do you actually have any tangible skills after spending a year or two earning you master's degree?

Consider your career goals, too. Do you want to teach at the college/university level when you graduate? Do you want to do research and write articles for journals? Or do you want to do something more practical and applicable to daily life? If you want to teach, I'd recommend completing a two-year program in the States from a recognized university that won't cause too many future employers to ask, "Now where did you go to school?" If you can find a great and very specific program overseas that will qualify you to teach here, then I'd say go overseas. If you study in the U.K., tuition is cheaper (though living expenses vary from place to place and from person to person), and you only have to go a year. An overseas degree is fine for pursuing a job in the non-profit field, which is great if you really want to get down and get dirty.