This Masters experience.

I'm finally done. Done with education, done with essays, done with all this stress around deadlines for handing in work.

It's been a really weird experience this year. In some ways, it's comparable to 3rd year of uni but in other ways it's completely different. Having changed field and university, it was like jumping into a new subject with no prior knowledge or background of what even HR is. Well, I had an idea it was just those people in companies that deal with CVs, payroll etc. I must admit that this year learning about HRM has been insightful, enriching and interesting in its own ways. But with its ups, there are also downs. I just wanted to talk about the course in general and the way I see Westminster teaches it. It's going to be quite critical because I had a long think about what I really hated about the way this university teaches these business masters.

So without all the waffle, the main issue I had was that the course is really geared towards people already working in HR. If I knew this beforehand, I probably wouldn't have done it there. Working for a company will make your whole degree at Westminster about 10x easier as you can participate in lectures more, base pretty much EVERY single piece of your coursework on your company and of course, pass with flying colours on your project because it's considered empirical and relevant to the course. If you don't, well you'll probably struggle and your work might even be unimpressive and uninteresting to lecturers because you're given a boring alternative coursework question to explore. Also, your project might be dull and uninteresting because you'll have to base it on a sector or get into contact with an organisation to help you - basically it'll be tough collecting data and you'll have about 100 methodological problems and might not even break the 60 mark because of these reasons. That's the way I was made to feel anyway. People working in HR and are funded by their companies to study this course (kinda explains why it costs £10,000 to study it) are advantaged in some ways. I've also heard that lecturers tend to favourite these group of part-time evening students that come after work to study because they contribute a lot more the in class discussions. In short, I just feel that whoever coordinated the course didn't think much about students that perhaps don't work in HR.

Second thing was the teaching delivered to us. Maybe my expectations were just high but coming from a top-ish university like Royal Holloway, I was expecting experts in the field of HR to teach but in the end I was taught by adults who just simply worked in HR for a number of years and went and completed a PhD in it afterwards. These people weren't well known in the literature of HR and some of them were just plain terrible at teaching. I had a lecturer that was absent for 70% of the course because she was ill. Of course I can't blame her for being ill but the person that covered her position didn't know a thing about the module and just taught out of the core textbook for the whole of the module. There could've been at least some communication between them no matter how bed-ridden she was. Lectures were ridiculously long as well, some of them did not even need to be so long. People were switched off by the 2nd hour so I don't really understand why lectures had to be 3 hours long. I felt like a lot of the time was taken through pointless in class activities and discussions. Again, most of these discussions seemed to benefit people that already work in HR because they were activities like "discuss with your group about your current organisational culture". I still remember the awkwardness from the table of people where none of them worked. Lecturers didn't even consider about those that didn't work and so they were just sat twiddling their thumbs until the end of discussion time. Wonderful.

I can't say I haven't learn anything from this course, although it was much more independent than undergraduate, I can say I was ready for it. I studied hard, read a lot, revised hard for exams like before, failed 2 pieces of coursework but still brought it back in the exam. It's been an eventful year because I've never actually failed anything before until masters. I guess it's the whole thought of "this degree costs £10,000" that makes you really work for it. But now it's over I feel a little bittersweet because I'm still going to be waiting for my degree classification and final project marks as well as having to attend the graduation. So I can't say I'm ready for the world of work yet, in fact I'm not. Just thinking about the future and applying for jobs scares me a little. People I used to go to school with have started working a long time ago but in my mind, I'm still in that school mode of studying, exams, coursework etc. Definitely going to find it difficult to adjust when I do start working, but hey, this is life right? Life has got to start at some point right?

I'm excited for the future... Working, saving up, moving out, getting married, having children, watching my children grow up. But I can already imagine there's going to be lots of humps and bumps on that road and I'm scared at the same time.