Concordia

For the master's degrees in particular, see if any of their graduates go on to PhD programs. For someone making a transition, that might end up being a decent plan. Whether that's a smart endgame is another question, as knp observes. As for accreditation, I don't know why it would not have that if the university does. And certainly Edinburgh in particular is a well-established place, internationally. But people are snobby at weird times. I'm doing a part-time (not distance/online) master's at Cambridge, and one of my classmates-- with very good grades, an important project, and massive support from his current thesis supervisor who happens to be an Oxford don-- got dinged by Oxford's DPhil program. One guy on the committee had a bug up his butt about that particular master's degree, even though his information may have been a decade or two out of date. So my friend will likely wind up full-time at Cambridge for a PhD, which wouldn't be a bad alternative. As for teaching posts, one of our instructors/supervisors did her own master's in the same program. At that time Cambridge didn't have a part-time option for PhDs, which she needed for family reasons, I'd guess. So she did that at a top-drawer plate-glass university and is now on the Cambridge faculty. One of the heads of an important wing of the history department therestarted with a BA from the Open University. His postgrads were at Oxford and Cambridge, which obviously helped, but still shows that many things can be overcome.

I think that's just an administrative procedure that would normally be measured in days, not weeks.

We are all so fabulous here that you couldn't possibly compare normal applicants to us. Relax.

A lot of this will depend on the folkways of your classroom. If the assignment was "write something good-- about 10 pages," the professor might see that as a minimum to be sure that you weren't just repeating that morning's horoscope. After all, 10 pp takes you well beyond the 5-paragraph thing, and forces you to develop some depth in your argument. Other places, it's pretty brutal and will come down the other way. Cambridge essays will usually have a MAXIMUM word limit, and there are warnings in the course handbooks that you will be punished for going over. You then have to submit a declaration with paper guaranteeing that it isn't over the limit, and now that we have word count software, it's possible to fill in "3,996" with some confidence. And they have the ability to check quickly. Our last class before the dissertation deadline, there were many nervous questions about whether footnotes were included (i.e., would hurt you), what the protocol was for tables, etc. Whether the real problem would be going over by 5 words or 10% may depend on the situation, but that's the lay of the land there.

Still, delivering a child isn't really a negotiable item. Maybe inquire informally?

Can you negotiate a deferral for maternity leave? Postponing everything for a year may clear up what you really want to do.

Yeah-- the Brits can be strange, but there are limits.

No idea where this came from-- must have been the iPhone spell-check.

Cambridge calendar is much the same, and their MPhil course websites make it clear that five weeks of vacation on the cake day amounts to just a few days "off"-- given that you might have to get a jump on reading for Lent term and you have a dissertation due in the spring.

To a point, proving that you CAN do high-quality work outweighs the fact that you didn't always manage that. If you're transitioning, perhaps a post-bacc to an MA. Do well in all that, and someone will be happy to have you. But, as always, ask someone who has to pull that trigger. No point in knocking yourself out for a year and $40k if you won't get the desired result.

Well, somewhere out there is software that makes it easier to look around your desk. But I won't commit to one package until I've seen a few of them tried in front of me. Switching is a frightening prospect.

Sorry-no. Other than a Moleskine notebook and odds and end that I put into a 3-ring binder, my main tools are Word and Excel, although EasyBib is a useful adjunct when it comes to manufacturing citations. Still, my resulting computer directories are a real ragbag, and I am fortunate to be having to cope with only a master's thesis right now. At this point, I'm looking at spending a day or more doing nothing but cleaning up footnotes and making sure that all of my sources (cited and not) are actually in the bibliography that looked halfway-decent last fall.

Any useful software for tracking what you read? I'm thinking of library trips where you have to scribble a few things about a reserve book, list a few other sources you find on the way, knowing that you'll have to dump it all into a bibliography and be able to remind yourself a year from now where you found it and what if anything you saw in it.

I think the main issue is that you will have a diploma and no pending indictment for you got it.

Spin it positively if you don't want gossip and can't improve things. "Program U was one of my top choices, but Program Them had a really attractive culture and some other things that worked for my situation."

Back when my mother was in med school, there was a rumor that the acceptances for her class all went to the wrong 100 people (or whatever). This wouldn't just be a variant of that, would it?

I speak without direct knowledge of OP's choices, but assuming money is a constraint, then funding is a big deal. Unless the MA is a magic bullet for the career, then you'd be looking at a round of PhD applications with a nice overhang of debt. Not fun. Now, I don't know what PhD programs will say about an early exit with an MA from one of their lower-ranked rivals, but if you're that worried about your Plan B, do check it out-- and make sure that you have the best possible CV when you re-apply to all the fantastic programs in 2 years. I'm assuming that it really is OK for what you need, and isn't so much more inappropriate than your original first choice.

Cambridge's MPhil is a 1-year program, roughly comparable to Oxford's MSt. Cambridge's MSt is part-time, and stretches what would normally be the MPhil's workload over 2 years.

A lot depends on how you define 'luxury', and this seems not to have been done at the start. You could say that because it is expensive, i.e., unaffordable to most people without some financial arrangements, and is often used to denote status, it's on the way there. To make it a real luxury, however, you'd also have to say that there is no positive return on investment. Like peacock feathers on hats. That could be looked at from the student's point of view, and from society's. On the student side, there are quite a few threads about liberal arts PhDs causing financial misery. So you might include that. Business degrees, less so. Occasionally, magazines will try to rank programs by ROI. Law school graduates are seeing a real crunch, as lawyers are even more plentiful than people in some neighborhoods. Science/engineering? Probably a more sensible return for the student there, although I'm sure there are misallocations. On the other side (society's), is there some value to having an academy run the way it is, so that you could justify the expense of subsidizing just about everything one way or another? I hope so, although that is harder to prove. That would make the knowledge generated by the academy a public good-- like fresh air or roads that work properly. Everyone, on average, benefits, even if nobody wants to pay for the piece that benefits them most.

If you're leaving the center of Boston for Allston/Brighton, you're probably talking about the Green Line from Park Street or Government Center. (Is this Suffolk?) Pretty much every branch of that will start its last trip after midnight. http://www.mbta.com/schedules_and_maps/subway/lines/default.asp?route=GREEN There was a small scandal when the hours got peeled back for financial reasons a few weeks ago, but even with that, I think all of the MBTA lines go until at least 12. Other non-Green-Line hubs that are useful are Back Bay and South Station. Buses are harder to figure out, and the drivers' sick time scheme is such that they're often not there in bad weather. But stay within walking distance of the T and you'll be OK.

My current laptop (Lenovo x1 Carbon) is having a few hardware problems due to old age. Being unimaginative, I am replacing it with an X260. I still have trouble figuring out why I'd need to touch the screen for anything I do.

redjacobin brings up an interesting point-- on the financial as well as the PR front, having a year between MSt and PhD to save more money (and stop spending it on school) while working on your apps could be a nice benefit. Totally off topic to RJ: for those choosing colleges, which one were you in, how was that, and did you get unexpectedly good or bad feedback about other colleges?

I'm trying to migrate to a standing desk, but I am also a lazy SOB, and I like working sprawled 90 degrees off axis in a big armchair. If you use a standard desk, one good thing to look for is a practice chair. Steinway used to sell them, and here is one of that deslgn:http://www.cpsimports.com/jansen-practice-piano-chair.html. You can get cheaper ones with metal adjustable legs: https://www.johnsonstring.com/cgi-bin/music/scripts/violin-viola-cello-music.cgi?itemno=ACCECHA01. The thing is to have it tip forward just a bit, so your back stays straight and your stomach relatively taut while you sit. Pianists use them, and other musicians find them good at preventing problems while doing unnatural things with the rest of their bodies. Gets rid of tension remarkably well.

I'm not in English lit, and I'm on your side of deciding about a PhD, so take this with a grain of salt. Yes, a 2-year degree has the potential to teach you more than a 1-year degree. That said, I'm not sure that you gain much more except in academic terms. After all, an MSt in Medieval and Renaissance literature is kind of obscure, but there isn't a huge market of people dying to hire English MAs, either. Sorry. Marking 'schemes' are somewhat less differentiated in the UK, or at least, more obscure. Oxford is more or less like Cambridge, where you'll have modules with essays or exams that will generate grades, and then (I suppose) a dissertation of some kind, with its grade. Postgrad degrees don't indicate how you did (unlike the undergrads who will get a "first", a "2:1", a "Desmond", etc. actually printed on the diploma). But you'll have a transcript and an average, any part of which you can tell people about. That average may be confusing for someone not used to the UK system. Unlike here, where you start at 100 and have things chipped off, they start at zero and see what you can add. At Cambridge, in order to pass a Master's program, you need 60. 67 is the "leave to continue" mark, which indicates that you probably have what it takes to get a PhD. 70 is the equivalent of a "first" and 75 and 80 are varying degrees of distinction. Some programs will have a grade for the whole thing (apart from "pass"), and the rules can get tricky. I think at my program at Cambridge, you need a 70 in all of your work to get a distinction. Now, I'm averaging 70, but even if I get well above that on my thesis, I'm knocked out of a distinction on the whole thing because two of my essays weren't as good as the other two. I could, of course, if I finish strongly, say that I got a distinction on my thesis (as well as the "high pass" on the coursework). The vocabulary changes a bit, but the scale is roughly the same. Some say the humanities have more compressed grades than the math/science areas, because it's a lot harder to be original and brilliant on a topic that has been around for a thousand years, whereas the math guys actually can get completely right answers. But you'll be getting recommendations with your scores, if you ask nicely, so that ought to sort itself out. In other words, unless you blow the doors off the place and get a starred distinction on your thesis, or some such, it might be harder to build a completely bulletproof CV. But you will, I would think, be able to make yourself a stronger candidate by learning different working and learning styles and maybe getting a better clue of what you want do in later research. About selectivity-- rates of acceptance are higher at Oxbridge, but there's also a lot of self-selection and intimidation involved. They will say up front what the minimum GPA will be of any successful applicant, which probably weeds out a lot of the marginal cases who wouldn't hesitate to try their luck with Yale. If you go to The Student Room board, you'll find a lot of Brits who are very fluent in this, talking about aiming for a score on one module that will pull them up into a 2:1 average, which is kind of their B+/A- territory, and is required by a lot of employers as well as further education programs. Again, I have no idea what US PhD committees think about all this.

I've never been to or considered Bloomington, but if you are looking for something to do and like music at all, it has one of the best music schools in the country. Lots of student and faculty performances. Their opera program was also considered world class-- don't know what's up with that now.