Why Go Beyond a Bachelor’s Degree?

Once you’ve graduated, it’s easy to quickly feel a little lost and confused. While you’ve spent the past three or four years studying an area of specialist interest (generally culminating in an in-depth dissertation focusing on your specific research topic), you may come to find that you don’t really know what you want to do or what path you’d like to follow once you’ve thrown your cap in the air and had your photo taken with your certificate at your ceremony. This isn’t all too surprising. After all, this is the first time in years that you don’t some sort of structure or timetable to follow. Take comfort in the fact that hundreds of thousands of other graduates are in the same boat, feeling exactly the same way. While there are an infinite amount of different ways you can progress from this point, there seems to be one that is rapidly improving in popularity: a continuation of your higher education. Here are just a few reasons that you might want to go beyond a bachelor’s degree.

Biding Your Time

Now, one of the most common reasons that people tend to pursue master’s degrees tends to be that they want to bide their time. They don’t know what to do, so might as well gain a further qualification while they make up their minds. Now, this could be absolutely fine. After all, additional qualifications are always going to look great on your resume. If you have a scholarship of some sort, you have nothing to worry about! However, if you’re going to be paying for this degree out of your own pocket, you need to put a serious amount of consideration into whether this is the right path for you. There’s no point continuing with a master’s degree for the sake of continuity and comfort. Remember that you’ll just be in the same position again in a year or two’s time! This time could be put to better use working your way up the job ladder if you don’t intend to use your master’s degree for any reason in particular.

Specialising your Knowledge

Perhaps the most sensible reason to do a master’s degree is to specialise your knowledge. Bachelor’s degrees tend to be a little more broad in scope to allow for the numerous students interests to be catered to. Masters degrees, on the other hand, tend to take existing knowledge from your bachelor’s and apply it to more niche or specific subject areas or topics. This makes you a more appealing candidate when you apply to specialist positions, or could endow you with the essential knowledge to set up a freelance project or business of your own. A course like distance learning msc finance, for example, could set you up with everything you need to land a place in a financial department of a renowned company.

For the Love of Your Subject

A final reason for continuing your education tends to be for the student’s sheer love of their subject. This tends to be a dominant motivation for students of literature, art, and philosophy, but can spread to other subject areas too.

Remember that further education is a big commitment and not a decision to be made lightly. So put plenty of thought into it!