A Letter to My Postgrad Self

As editor at FindAMasters I spend a lot of time trying to help prospective postgraduates, whether here on the blog, elsewhere in our advice section or 1-2-1 at our study fairs and events. It goes with the job.

Well, I want to do something a little different in this post and offer some advice to myself, 14 years ago.

Now, the laws of Physics make this more or less impossible – at least so far as I can tell. My Masters had more to do with History than science, but we didn't discover time travel there either (which is a shame; it would have made the dissertation research so much easier).*

There are some good reasons for writing this though. The most obvious is that it will hopefully be useful to you, considering a Masters in the future (things have changed since 2006, but not as much as you might think). The other is that it amuses me and I can more or less write what I like on this blog, provided it's linked to postgrad study. It kind of goes with the job.

Anyway, to the DeLorean / Tardis / Skynet thing!

*True story: I did actually research time travel during my Masters. Well, sort of. One of the modules was on Victorian genre fiction and included H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.

I am writing to you from the future – 2020 to be precise. A lot has changed. You wouldn't believe who's currently in 10 Downing Street, which team is about to walk the Premier League, how many albums Biffy Clyro have released or that people are reading this on tiny little screens they keep in their pockets and use to browse Facebook (which you're currently ignoring in favour of MySpace, you poor fool).

Anyway! You are about to start your Masters degree. Iirc, you're a little bit excited, but also quite nervous. This is definitely the hardest challenge you've ever taken on so far and some bits of it are going to be tough. The good news is that you're going to be fine. Ten years from now you'll back nostalgically on this year of intense study and scholarship, as you find yourself changing nappies at 5.30am (spoiler).

You're going to get most of the next year right, but not all of it. So, I'm here to help. You can thank me in about 14 years.

You're going to be very self-disciplined during this course, more so than you ever were as an undergraduate and probably a bit more than you will be during your PhD (we'll get to that in a bit, but yes: you are going to do a PhD).

You'll make a point of doing all the reading for each seminar and make useful notes as you go. You'll then read these notes and condense them into a few key taking points for the week's seminar.

This is hard work, but it is good work. You'll come through the course with a thorough background knowledge of the material you're working on and you'll get used to tackling fairly complex secondary criticism. This will make choosing and planning essay topics really easy and actually quite satisfying.

BUT! You are also going to stress yourself out and develop way too much of a guilty conscience about leisure time. Don't do that. Get the reading done and then head to the student bar or stick a TV show on instead of trying to do more reading. You'll be a lot less anxious come Christmas.

So, those notes are great, but they probably don't need to be quite as detailed as you're going to make them at first. You won't miss anything out that way, sure, but you'll also have a lot to read and evaluate when the time comes to plan essays.

You'll realise this yourself ahead of your dissertation and will start using a set of small index cards to organise ideas and force yourself to be concise. This will seem old-fashioned even in 2006 but it's a great way to keep a handle on things. It might not hurt to use that trick right from the start.

So, you'll need to 'pitch' each of your essay topics to the module tutor. They're both great teachers and really engaged in the course, but their time is limited. You'll begin to realise just how limited once you move on to independent academic work and teaching, yourself, but trust me for now: they could do without reading those long stream-of-consciousness explorations of all the possible permutations for your essay topic.

You know it's a good topic, which is why you're able to talk about all those possible directions to take it in. Give them a quick summary, get a (much) quick(er) reply and get down to writing the actual essay, in Microsoft Word, not Microsoft Hotmail (soon to be replaced by Microsoft Outlook).

This feels like it should be self-explanatory but it wasn't / won't be. Yes, the snow is lovely. Yes, it looks even lovelier on the Welsh hills across the valley from your student accommodation. But if you open the skylight to look at the snow on the hills, some of the snow will fall on your face.

Right now, you don't really have much idea what a PhD is, beyond knowing that it's the next degree after a Masters and is probably only for absolutely amazing total geniuses who are guaranteed to get an academic job and spend the rest of their careers walking blissfully between the library and the lecture hall, probably wearing tweed.

One thing you should know about a PhD is that a Masters isn't it. A PhD thesis needs to present a completely original contribution to knowledge that stands up to the most rigorous academic scrutiny. A Masters essay doesn't. Neither does a Masters dissertation, to be honest.

Sure, it's great if you can put forward an original argument and argue for it persuasively. You're also more than up to that (so is everyone else who gets accepted for a Masters). But that doesn't mean you have to check every book in the library to make sure no one has ever published anything remotely similar to the interpretation you're arguing for in this piece of university coursework.

You're doing this course because you like it. You chose to move to Wales to go to one of the only universities offering it. Don't lose sight of that once you get started. Putting a text in a reading list doesn't change it. And nor does having to write an essay about it. Particularly when you get to choose the topic.

Don't lose sight of what a Masters is. The whole 'Masters degree' thing is a bit misleading. Sure, you're going to be tackling advanced material and, yes, you'll develop a level of mastery of the general principles of your subject, but that's not the same as mastering everything in it. You don't go from undergraduate competency to some sort of weird academic omniscience in one year. In fact, you don't do that ever (even after a PhD).

So don't worry when you come across a particularly obtuse journal article or simply don't get what everyone else sees in the material it's commenting on. It just means that material isn't for you.

See above, really. There are people who can follow every step of the arguments put forward, in detail, by the eighteenth-century idealist philosopher, Immanuel Kant. You are. . . not one of them.

Incidentally, you won't really get Jacques Derrida either, but it's a lot easier to pretend you do.

Yep, it's true. They'll introduce postgraduate student loans in 2016, by which time you'll have long since finished your (self-funded) Masters and will be explaining how this finance works for other students.

It's worthy of a line in an Alanis Morrisette song. She's still going strong in 14 years too, btw.

So look, we both know that one of the reasons you did this Masters was because you hadn't decided what else to do. There were some other factors too – wanting to challenge yourself, enjoying the subject, seeking to stand out in the employment market. Those were (and are) perfectly good reasons to consider a Masters. But let's not kid ourselves: a big part of this was down to the fact that you were used to university and didn't really have an alternative plan figured out.

By the end of this course you still won't and one of the things that's going to seem tempting is staying on again, this time for a PhD. In fact, that's what you're going to do.

I won't tell you not to do that (your PhD is going to be a pretty cool experience too) but I will suggest you take a bit longer to think it over. Basically, don't do it just because your favourite course tutor says you can.

You're only going to try it once, but I'll spare you the trouble (and the money). It's going to be awful. Somehow both dry and soggy, chewy and crunchy and tasting nothing like fish. Just don't.

Anyway, the local Chinese delivers to halls.

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