Getting off my own lawn
May 21, 2010 10:23 AM   Subscribe

I've been accepted for an MA programme starting in October but I'll be relocating as a mature student if I take the full-time route and I'm worried about about culture-shock. Any tips?

I'm 35 with some strong prior experience in the field and I'm taking the course for professional development - the programme I'm going for is considered solid by the industry.

I went to the department's open day and was really impressed by the programme and the staff - it has amazing, purpose-built facilities and is top in it's field for research, but I realised that I'd be older and more experienced than most of my classmates. The campus-based intake ranges from recent undergrads to early career changers with little to no industry experience (ages 21-28). I raised my concern with the course leader and he said that it wouldn't be a problem but I'm not so sure - especially seeing as the student rep on the open day (age 22) told us she took the course because she 'couldn't decide what to do next'.

If it was all autonomous I wouldn't be so worried but there is a large group-work component and I'm apprehensive. I got my (funded) MSc 11 years ago and I know the mature students sometimes found it difficult to 'step-down' from professional experience in group-work. As I'm paying for this degree with (hard-earned!) savings I want to make sure it's going to be worth it. If the course was in a large city I wouldn't mind so much, but it isn't so I'll be immersed in small-town college life for the duration and am worried about feeling isolated.

The alternative is to do it distance-learning for two years. Th DL intake tends to be older and more experienced. This would give me the option of staying in my big city, but working part-time for two years could prove too costly time and money-wise in the long run.

Am I right to be concerned? Does anyone have any advice on getting over myself re: the age/experience gap if I do go full-time? Any perspective is welcome! (Anonymous as current work colleagues read MF and have no idea I'm planning to jump ship).
posted by anonymous to Education (2 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I'm 41 and doing a full-time, self-funded MSc: as in your programme, most of my fellow students are recent graduates in their early 20s. My university is in a small town too: I've been living off-campus a few miles away from it. There has been an element of group work (somewhere between 5-10% of the total) in my course, so it's not been a major component. The main issue I've had wasn't so much with my fellow group-members' relative inexperience as such, but with their relative lack of work-ethic, organisation, motivation etc. In short they were about as slack as I was at that age, which meant I found I ended up doing a greater than equal share of the work to get things finished to my own satisfaction!
posted by misteraitch at 12:06 PM on May 21, 2010


I've not had the experience of academic group-work (not done in my field of study), but outside of your class you may find that you have a lot in common with some of the older PhD students or younger faculty. So there is that to think about in terms of the social environment.
posted by jb at 12:18 PM on May 21, 2010


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