I can't fund the Masters course I want to take.

[zoooo]

I got a research council bursary to fund my masters this year. Course fees paid plus a thousand pounds a month maintenance.

You absolute bastard.

 

[Red Cat]

Personally speaking I wouldn't spend £4k and a year out working to do a masters in something like that. If I was going to do a Masters in environmentalism I'd do it in something useful and practical like architecture, engineering, or environmental science rather than something conjectural as global warming. It's a bit wishy washy.

It claims to prepare students to conduct research into environmental change and policy development. Sounds pretty useful and practical to me.

BTW the course is offered part-time. I looked it up to see what it was all about. Looks interesting

 

[idioteque]

Thankyou to everyone that has given practical advice, you lot have given me a load of things to look at I'm going to speak to try and speak to relevant people at Kings and where I already am and investigate the other suggestions. I may well end up deferring a year or two and trying to get a better paying job in the meantime though, it seems like this might be the most straightforward thing to do.

It isn't easy to get a foot in the door in the field without higher qualifications than a BSc. I am quite surprised at this perception of the subject as some sort of hippy area. Feel free to have a read of the course description at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/gsp09/programme/536, but I'm not going to get drawn into questioning the sincerity of the subject. I made the thread to find out about funding, not whether Global Environmental Change is a worthwhile thing to be doing.

 

[madzone]

What are you working in at the moment?

 

[Kanda]

PT Home: £2550 (2009).. but it'll take 2 years. Not a bad option.

 

[Santino]

employers like to see real actual experience rather than epic amounts of study though, sorry to piss on your chips, but you both sound very naive about this.

Not in certain areas.

There are plenty of companies that employ people with the right qualifications, like statistics, straight out of university at very good salaries. As long as you can do the job employers don't give a shit if you fulfill some stereotype of 'real' experience.

 

[sim667]

Thankyou to everyone that has given practical advice, you lot have given me a load of things to look at I'm going to speak to try and speak to relevant people at Kings and where I already am and investigate the other suggestions. I may well end up deferring a year or two and trying to get a better paying job in the meantime though, it seems like this might be the most straightforward thing to do.

It isn't easy to get a foot in the door in the field without higher qualifications than a BSc. I am quite surprised at this perception of the subject as some sort of hippy area. Feel free to have a read of the course description at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/gsp09/programme/536, but I'm not going to get drawn into questioning the sincerity of the subject. I made the thread to find out about funding, not whether Global Environmental Change is a worthwhile thing to be doing.

What about applying for research vacancies at universities?

 

[idioteque]

What are you working in at the moment?

I work in a zoo, not really related to my subject area (I am studying Geography atm) I started doing it three years ago in my holidays to get a bit of money, wish I'd done placements or voluntary work now.

What about applying for research vacancies at universities?

I haven't really considered that before tbh, and don't know a great deal about what it's like to do research postgrad studies, I'll look into it, thanks.

 

[Agent Sparrow]

A research post could be pretty ideal actually. Even if it's not directly in the area you'd like to go into, it will be good for showing you've developed your research skills. Does the masters have a research component, and are you likely to do a phud afterwards?

Even if you end up office temping for a year though, with a bit of creativity you can make a case that it's given you all sorts of relevant, transferable skills.

 

[Oswaldtwistle]

A research post could be pretty ideal actually. Even if it's not directly in the area you'd like to go into, it will be good for showing you've developed your research skills. Does the masters have a research component, and are you likely to do a phud afterwards?

Even if you end up office temping for a year though, with a bit of creativity you can make a case that it's given you all sorts of relevant, transferable skills.

There are certainly worse things in the world than a year of office temping, and if you've not done much work yet, it'll be good on the CV


However it does always strike me as slightly odd that you can get *automatic* funding to repeat a year of uni, even if you fail for no good reason and just spent the time getting wasted, but no funding for a postgrad year for a good student.

 

[Vintage Paw]

She's on track for a 2:1 and scholarships/bursaries are really only available to those who graduate with a 1st.

Not true. It's all down to your research proposal, how well suited your supervisor is to your research proposal, and if you can prove the institution you want to do the research at is the best one for you, and vice versa.

Plenty of people with 1sts don't get funding from the research councils, but it's been known for people with 2:2s to get it.

fwiw, no councils will fund postgrad courses (masters anything, or PhD). The students loan company won't either.

The general options are:

ESRC (in idioteque's case, there is also the AHRC for arts and humanities)
School/College bursary/award
Career Development Loan
Company Sponsorship.

Otherwise it's self-fund all the way.

There is precious little funding out there for people at postgrad level. Well, the funding's there, but it's nigh on impossible (or so it seems) sometimes to get it.

In terms of ESRC, as I deal with the AHRC I'm not sure of time frame, but the deadline has likely passed for applying for Sept. It was a good couple of months ago for AHRC, and you needed to be working with your supervisor and institution months in advance of that.

In terms of school/college awards, only thing to do is get in touch with the uni and see what they make available.

I don't know anything about career development loans or company sponsorship, sorry.

Funding bodies, them I've got experience with. All you can do is try.

 

[mistere]

Ask the department what research council the course is linked to, for a sciencey subject it's unlikely to be ESRC or AHRC. They should be able to give you details so you can apply. The science research councils tend to have substantially more funding available as well, and are more willing to fund one year masters than the AHRC and the ESRC which prefer to fund only PhDs (at least, that's the impression I have from a lot of my friends doing sciencey courses). As KCL is a preety good uni they might well get swung additional funding as well from the government so talk to the department about bursaries, etc. If that doesn't work out then a Career Development Loan is the best bet, there's three banks that offer them (there were three a couple of years back, I don't know if Britain still has three banks anymore!) and you don't pay anything back, until a few months after completeing the course, you can borrow up to £6000 and repay it over a fixed time period so you can plan for the future as you know exactly how much you have to pay back per month and they tend to be sympathetic(ish) if you need a further deferment of a few months before starting to pay it back. Hope that helps!

 

[Red Cat]

I may well end up deferring a year or two and trying to get a better paying job in the meantime though, it seems like this might be the most straightforward thing to do.

I would get the career dev loan (or other funding options that have been mentioned) and do it part-time and try and get some work on top of the zoo work, like bar work or something. There's a recession and a lot of people are being made redundant even in London. Advice to 'get a job' assumes that it'll be easy. Well I wouldn't bet on it if I were you. I'd focus on the course you want to do, live with your parents if that's what you need to do and find a way to top up your wages. Even if you get a decent paid job, doing work that you don't want to do is shit.

 

[ericjarvis]

So how do other people fund it then?

I didn't. Partly that's because Haringey stopped funding all discretionary grants less than two months before my course was supposed to start, so I didn't have enough time to fund raise, and most of the available options had already gone. Still, it all worked out in the end. The (Tory) government got what they wanted since my place was taken by the son of a Tory MEP who then completely failed to make a career of it (because he was crap). I simply hung around with the people who actually did the course picking up as much as I could about what they were doing, and eventually managed to start getting work by blagging my way in and using the contacts from the course I didn't do.

Slightly different as this was a one year theatre directors course.

 

[Ann Tigonie]

Just out of interest what kind of career demands that you need a maters before you can get into it at any level?

Librarianship