Are Postgraduate Loans Realistic? - 5 Ways to Top Up Your Funding

Chandanee Mistry is a fourth year student at Nottingham Trent, studying Biological Sciences. In this blog, Chandanee talks about postgraduate loans and ways of topping up your funding to cover living and tuition costs.

Will a postgraduate loan be enough to pay for your Masters? Many of you will be aware that the answer to this question will depend on your circumstances, and it won’t necessarily be ‘yes’.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea of a postgraduate loan is brilliant, and will allow many students, privileged or non-privileged, to continue their studies and gain more skills to pursue their chosen careers. However, as a prospective 2018 Master’s student (hopefully), I’ve found finding funding difficult – even with this new postgraduate support factored in.

Yes, the loans do provide up to £10,280 (rising to £10,609 in the 2018/19 academic year). But for some students, like myself, this just isn’t enough.

Universities can charge different amounts for postgraduate tuition fees, and these depend on the institution, location and type of course you’re looking for. And remember, unlike funding for an undergraduate degree, there is no separate maintenance loan. There’s only that £10,280 for tuition fees, food, accommodation, study materials, travel and any other expenses during your degree.

But don’t worry, there is HOPE!

So, what other ways can you fund yourself?

Here are 5 tips I’ve found are helping me to organise my plans for next year and, I hope, help you too.

The first and probably the most obvious tip is to find a part time job or summer job and build up some savings ahead of your postgraduate degree.

You should think carefully about working during the final year of an undergraduate degree as it’s your hardest year and you’ll most likely be opting for hours in the library over hours working a shift. However, all part-time income is useful. I’m a Biological Sciences student in my final year at Nottingham Trent University and have two casual jobs with the university: as a 1st year Student Mentor and Student Ambassador.

If you can’t work part-time during your degree, consider finding a full-time job after. You could have a couple of months available before your Masters begins. This can be an ideal opportunity to earn a little extra cash.

As well as adding to your CV and potential applications, the money gained from jobs like these all adds up and to quote a cheesy line “every little helps”!

This is a point I didn’t know until I went to my university job fair. Many universities (including mine) offer discounted tuition fee rates for students who attended the university as an undergraduate, kind of like a loyalty card scheme. These percentage reductions pay off! They can be anything from 25% to 50% in the schemes I’ve seen, with extra deductions for good academic merit also.

The decision to stay or move for your Masters has its own pros and cons, however.

Pros: You’ve been there for years, you’ll know the university and staff well by this point, you’ll know the area and can probably nab a friend to live with.

Cons: Often Masters students will try and go to a university that’s top for the subject or specialism they’re looking to do, or has a better overall reputation or ranking. Therefore, you might not want to stay. On the bright side, this means a new area if you’re living away from home, a new cost of living, new people and new surroundings.

This can vary depending on the university you’re applying to, but most offer scholarships to both home and international students. These can be anywhere from £1000 to £10,000 in particular universities.

I would recommend making sure you look directly on their website for this information in case scholarship sites don’t advertise it.

Turn2Us advertises certain charities that give grants for academic purposes. I’ve been recently trialling this one to see whether charities would be willing to provide university funding and it’s been successful so far.

As my home town is Northampton, the search tool found charities in the local area (whether you attend university there or not). The three charities I found were The Becketts and Sergeants Educational Foundation, The Sir Thomas White’s Northampton Charity and The Dorothy Johnson Charitable Trust.

Charities can offer smaller amounts than scholarships anywhere from £500-1000 per charity and all that’s needed is to fill in an application form which is sent off to the charity trust board. There’s advice out there on finding postgraduate funding from charities and, though I don’t have a personal success story to share (yet!), but it is worth a try.

Similarly to reading TripAdvisor reviews before going to a fancy restaurant, you want to make sure the university choice you make is a good one. There are many students also who blog about funding and the best ways you can source it, and this can be really helpful in finding ways you had not even thought of such as through crowdfunding.

Bloggers are also really helpful because they can provide you with an unfiltered, realistic and more interesting account of what being at the university is like, details about the course and what to expect and the overall pros and cons about doing a Masters course.

Now, I’m going to get back to my funding search. Hopefully these tips will help you in yours. Good luck!

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