Musing about master's degrees...

[electricland]

OK, so should I head for a master's in planning, I have once again missed the deadline for most schools (York being the happy exception... although my dad, who once taught there, has been making negative muttering noises about their faculty for some time now. But their program looks v. self-guided and cool. OTOH, do I need something self-guided? I know very little about this field).

Cities I'd quite like to be in, left to right:

Vancouver - UBC
Toronto - U of T, York
Kingston (maybe... well, it's closer to Toronto than I am now anyway) - Queen's
Montreal - McGill (quite miss McGill) -- plus U de M has one if I were feeling adventurous enough to start a degree in another language, which I'm not especially
Halifax - Dal

There are others near Toronto, such as Waterloo. But I dunno. There's one in Calgary too, but I've been to Calgary.

Ponder, ponder.

On the whole, probably best to focus my efforts on those that claim they only care about your final year GPA, since my GPA from the penultimate year really does not bear thinking about.

The thought of digging up academic references is grim and terrifying... still, as I was saying to crankygrrl, I can't have alienated all my profs, can I?

Comments

[bryghtboy.livejournal.com]

York has a couple major disadvantages, for starters the strikes that seem to forever be hanging over my school... then there is the fact its out in the ass end of nowhere. Add to this the fact it has quite possibly the ugliest campus that I've ever been to... it was originally designed to be built in California, then there was that crazy sonnva bitch in Texas who killed a whole lot of people from a belltower and they decided to re-think the whole wide open spaces idea around universities back in the early 60's. So it is really not designed to be a winter campus at all, the winds are just horrific up there some days and the between the snow and grey buildings its hard to be excited about showing up. That leaves you with only the teaching staff as being a draw for the place. Thus if you have no idea about how the prof's are in the faulty you are applying to, York doesn't have a whole lot of drawing power to it.

The two main reasons I'm still up there are: They haven't figured out how big a fraud I am (I keep expecting to get a letter saying something like.. "Wow, yer dumb get the fuck out" or something) and secondly they are very open to letting you take all sorts of very odd-ball electives ... like science-fiction films from 1982-2002... or appocalyptic Science fiction literature... or comics and cartooning from 1900-1950. If either of those thoughts seems attractive to you, York might not be the worst place for you... hope that helps some :P

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Hm. All very good points... thanks. I've been hearing horror stories about the York campus my entire life, but I don't believe I've ever actually been there!

I'd definitely need to find out more about the teaching staff. However, Anonymous down there assures me that they will most likely be thrilled to talk about themselves, should I enquire! And the oddball electives are a plus... in fact to my knowledge there IS only one required course for the MES, the rest is all electives.

A further possible drawback to York is the slightly creepy following-in-your-father's-footsteps aspect of the whole thing... McGill is one thing, but the same grad degree at the same university might be a little... weird.

Or maybe it's just me. Who can say?