Does anyone have any suggestions for how to go about contacting professors and seeing if they are interested in taking on a Masters student?
Is it better to just send a polite “request for information” type email, or a “Hello, I’m Caitlin and I’m awesome and you should be my Masters Advisor, let’s meet to discuss this” email?
To toss a wrench into the works, my university grades were less than stellar. I had an 89% overall GPA at Seneca, with a 92% for the last year, but my UoG grades are… not as pretty. Which, if you’re wondering, no, I don’t like admitting. I’m hoping my shiny smile and real world experience will make up for that part (and have it on good authority that one of the current PopMed MSc students has a 0 on his transcript, so it’s not all about the grades, despite what the Grad Calendar says).
—– long back story follows, if it’s tl;dr, please just reply to the above, thanks! —–
I was out for lunch with my awesome boss and her friend from UoG the other day, and this friend gave me three (!) names of profs to contact about being an MSc Advisor. Holy crap wow, she’s now my new favourite person. 😀
I was feeling a bit down on the whole Masters thing, since going to the info day and poking around the Graduate Calendar was rather discouraging to how I was envisioning this process. Ideally, I’d like to keep my full time job (because it is made of awesome and win) and go to school part time for a couple more years and at the end get a piece of paper with a higher degree than I currently have on it. I’m not interested in being the type of MSc student that’s chained in their lab for 16 hours a day for $20k a year (I already have a better job, thanks). And I’ll be honest, I’m not particularly interested in writing/defending a thesis. I just want to learn. (and get that dangling carrot)
Anyhoo, it was looking less and less likely that that was even a possibility, based on the rules and procedures in the Calendar and looking at what other MSc students were doing.
Then at lunch the topic swung around to whether or not I’d done a post-grad degree, and I said I’d like to. My boss said they were trying to convince me to keep my full-time job while I did it, and I quipped that first I needed to convince the school to let me do it that way. Friend-of-my-boss seemed confused that they wouldn’t, and I admitted I hadn’t actually talked to any profs because I thought doing it that way wasn’t actually feasible. She said that was exactly what some profs look for in a Masters student. We talked briefly about what type of MSc I was interested in (Epidemiology in the Population Medicine department of the OVC – in part due to my new interest in the dairy industry) and she mentioned there was an Epidemiology By Course Work MSc (which I knew) and gave me some names to contact (which is awesome), and said basically all I’d need to do is convince someone to be my MSc Advisor and then I could do it roughly the way I’m picturing.
So now I have to actually contact these people, and I don’t want to screw it up. Yikes! o_0
I really have no idea about this, since I got my MA in the (small, fairly close-knit) department where I got my BA, and so getting an advisor went like this:
“Hey Jeff, I want to do an MA here. If I get in, will you be my advisor?”
“Sure. What’s your thesis?”
I would recommend the second type of email you mention. You need to meet these people, both so that they’ll want to advise you and so that you can figure out if you want them to advise you (if you don’t get along with your advisor, grad school is HELL). Certainly when you meet with them you want to mention a. your good Seneca grades b. your not-as-good Guelph grades (and, if there’s a good/plausible reason for the decline and why it was only temporary, that too) c. that real-world experience, both in terms of “I’d be a good grad student” and “this is WHY I want to go to grad school” and d. the awesome job and the fact that you’re interested in grad school in addition no, not instead of, it.
You may have to meet them during office hours. I hope you can take breaks at your job.
(PS. awesome, 100% accurate icon for this post)
Andrea has her MSc in Micro Biology, but she got in right out of her BSc.
While she’s not here, she’d be the first to tell you, you’re not going to get what you want. MSc students are Slaves. Having an MSc allows you to be a Lab Tech for free. When you’ve graduated you have 2 options.
1) Go back to being a lab-tech
2) Keep going to school.
Ideally, you should have your employer sponsor you. Find out what kind of work in YOUR field is being done in Education. Have them put you in touch with them as someone WORKING on the leading edge and further, give them money. Getting an MSc is WAAAAY easier if you have funding. You show up with funding, they’ll take you.
I think the only educational funding my employer does (especially since they are a non-profit) is that if you take courses that are relevant/semi-relevant to your job, they will reimburse you for your tuition after you pass it.
Gosh, Gord doesn’t even know what kind of degrees I have. I have a M.Sc. with a specialization in Experimental Medicine.
Anyway, because you don’t want to do a thesis-based masters, you’re not going to get funding. No one is going to pay you to do course-based masters. Also, you don’t need a supervisor to do a course-based masters. It may be different at Guelph, so you need to make sure.
If you do need a supervisor, talk to his/her grad students first. Ask them what it’s like working under him/her. They’re going to tell you the truth but reassure them you’re going to keep it in confidence.
After you figure out which supervisor would be the best fit, send them an email expressing interest in his/her research and that you would like to be part of it. Something like “Hi, I’m Caitlin and I noticed you’re really awesome at whatever research. I’m interested in finding a masters supervisor in whatever field and I was wondering if you were recruiting any students. If you are, I would like to set up an appointment to meet with you and discuss this further.” Something like that.
With course-based masters, you could do it part-time. As long as you take the pertinent courses and get all the credits…piece of cake.
As for your grades, it depends on the department. Most require an OVERALL GPA of 3.0, but I’ve seen it as low as 2.3.
Good luck!
Thanks for replying! ^_^ Someone with an actual MSc is really helpful!
I can’t seem to get a straight answer out of Guelph re: needing an Advisor or not for a course-based degree. They tend to skim over course-based stuff.
All I’m really interested in is the education and the piece of paper at the end. If I can get my employer to pay my tuition (it’s part of my benefits package, but I have to present a case for it and get approval and then pass the courses), that would be excellent because it would mean I wouldn’t have to get student loans on top of my current student loans.
I like the idea of talking to their MSc students, too. I’m apparently going to be working on a joint project with one of them in the future, so that should be easy enough.
Thanks!
Andrea suggests that, because she warned all of her supervisors prospective students to RUN. Run away and never look back.
And now I suffer for letting her post from my computer.
Oh, I’m tempted to do that [run] too. It’s one of those things that totally sounds good in my head, and I’ll approve of it about 2 years after it’s over, but during the time I’m actually in school I’ll probably hate it.
Then again, it all depends on what kind of papers they make me write while doing course work. Part of why I hated university so much was the stark difference between it and the college I attended. At Seneca, I learned by doing lab techniques, and profs encouraged us and helped us out if we had problems. At university, I wasn’t allowed to do anything interesting in the labs (because it was all done by the TAs) and was treated like just a number, and was expected to simply regurgitate papers and writing standards instead of actually learning processes or skills.
That said, this time I know what I’d be getting myself in to, and while I’ll probably curse it at the time, I’m much less likely to take it out on myself since I know it’s coming. Plus, there’s always a tiny chance that post-grad instruction could be done differently than undergrad.