Hey K_angie, know you from The Student Room . Applied to the January deadline for the MPhil at Oxford, put all my eggs in one basket but I have my heart set on doing a DPhil there.
I notice that you've been accepted to a a fair few courses K_angie congratz!! Where have you been accepted to and from who are you waiting for a reply?
Well at least you can prepare yourself . A lot of people who go into development related graduate degrees don't understand the difficulty of finding a job afterwards and fall on the first hurdle x). For my degree application I had to highlight what sort of feasible direction I would like to take upon graduation.
I disagree, I think pinning it on the undergrad to masters with little experience simplifies/reduces it too much. In my opinion the issue of employment is more that a lot of people go into development studies and the likes thinking that it is almost vocational, as a stepping stone into a job "helping people"- in the UK it's a very middle class thing to have a gap year, help build a school and to take some moral grandiosity from it all.
Unlike say engineering where you get the training and BAM jobs are thrown at you, with development studies you need a passion beyond sympathy in a specialisation that you can excel at and make real contributions to field/peoples lives that others can't. So when people apply to this field without specific research/employment interests then that is where the issues lies. In fact it irritates me a little when I read about seemingly random applications to these sorts of courses. While this does relate to experience, people can come from undergraduate with the right mindset. I'm not disagreeing with the statement as such but how it generalises experience, e.g. experience within a particular role or wider wisdom that experience affords. Excuse my rambling haha!