How to choose the right Masters programme

A Masters shapes the next one to two years of your life, a good part of your finances and often the direction of your career. Reputation is one way to choose, but it tells you little about whether a particular course suits you, and some applicants only discover a poor fit after enrolling. It is worth comparing programmes on the things that affect what you get out of them.

If you are still deciding whether a Masters is the right step at all, start with Master’s or PhD? and come back here once you have a direction.

Begin with what you want from it

Decide what the Masters is for before you look at courses. For most people it is one of three things: a route into a particular career or industry, a step towards a PhD and research, or a change of field or country. The answer determines what a good programme looks like. A course that prepares people well for research can be a weak choice for someone heading straight into industry, and league tables do not show that difference.

Write your answer down in one sentence, for example “I want to move from general accounting into public financial management in government”. You will use that sentence to judge every course on your list, and it will be useful later in your personal statement.

Read the module list

The curriculum is a better guide than the brochure. Look at the modules and what you would study each term, and ask whether the content matches your goal, whether it is current, and whether there is room to specialise. Two courses with the same title can turn out to be quite different. Questions to answer from the programme pages:

• Which modules are compulsory, and which are options you can choose?
• Are the options you want offered every year, or only some years?
• What is the balance between taught content and independent work?
• Is there a dissertation, a practical project or a placement, and how much of the final mark does it carry?
• How is the course assessed: exams, coursework, presentations, or a mix?
• Does it lead to a professional accreditation that your target employers ask for?

If you are aiming for a PhD later, look closely at the research methods training and the size of the dissertation. If you are heading into industry, look for applied projects, placements and links with employers.

Practical factors

Several practical matters have a large effect on how the year goes and what comes after it:

• Funding: the total cost, and which scholarships or assistantships you could realistically get.
• Faculty and supervision: if you want to do research, who teaches and whether their work interests you.
• Outcomes: where graduates of this particular programme end up. If the department does not publish it, ask.
• Location and cost of living: a cheaper city can make more difference than a slightly better-known university.

On funding, the difference between full and partial awards matters a great deal for a one-year course; our guide to fully funded and partial scholarships explains what each usually covers.

For a course abroad, add the visa, travel and settling-in costs to the total, and check whether students on your visa can work alongside study. Our guide to choosing which country to study in covers those differences.

Ask people who have taken it

Programme websites describe the course at its best. Current students and recent graduates can tell you what it is like. Contact a few politely and ask what they would change, what surprised them, and whether they would choose it again. Short, specific messages tend to get more replies than long, general ones.

You can often find them through the department’s student profiles, a professional networking site, or the programme’s own student ambassadors. A message along these lines works well; the names and details below are invented.

1. 1Subject line: name the programme so they know at once what it is about.
2. 2How you found them: one line, so the message does not feel random.
3. 3Three specific questions: easy to answer from experience, and impossible to answer from the website.
4. 4A low bar: make it clear a short answer is fine.

Compare the shortlist

When you have three or four serious options, set them out side by side against your goal, the curriculum, funding, supervision, outcomes and cost. Laid out together, the trade-offs become easier to see, and a well-known name is less likely to outweigh a course that suits you better.

A filled-in grid might look like this. The programmes are invented and the entries are only an illustration of the kind of note to make.

	Programme A	Programme B	Programme C
Fit with my goal	Strong: policy and public finance options	Partial: mostly theory	Strong: applied, with a placement
Curriculum	Options I want offered every year	Two key options run only some years	Fixed curriculum, little choice
Funding I could get	Department scholarship, partial	None found yet	Eligible for a full external award
Outcomes	Graduates in ministries and NGOs	Mostly go on to PhDs	Employer links, placements
Total cost, including living	High, expensive city	Medium	Medium, cheaper city
What current students said	Heavy workload, good teaching	Not yet asked	Placement was the best part

Once the grid is filled in, the weak points tend to show themselves: an empty cell is a question you still need to answer, and a row where one programme is clearly worse is a reason to drop it. When the remaining options are close, choose the one whose curriculum fits your one-sentence goal best, and use the scholarship application checklist to plan the applications.