My situation is that I’ve got a 4-year degree in economics and history from a pretty good university. However, I was pretty mental during school and didn’t hand in a lot of my work or study, so my average is bad. I’d guess the CGPA is 2.5. If you go by my best half of my degree it’s 3.2 or so, with As in a few courses. It’s not really grad school material.
I went back and did a year of philosophy (12 credits worth) and got a 3.0 on that. If I wanted to, I could get a second BA by finishing 48 credits or so in a new major, like politics, sociology, or staying in philosophy. I could do that in two years sorta-full-time.
Another option would be to take upgrading courses in history or economics. So I could take maybe 12 or so additional credits (instead of a second BA), hopefully get good marks in them, and use that as the basis for a special application for a MA. The main issue with this is that if I wanted to start a history program soon then I’d need to be able to read in a research language. For economics the issue is that I’d basically have to teach myself undergrad economics and math again to be ready for the grad courses. So it’s not necessarily faster or cheaper.
I think my main interest is in history of socialist countries, specifically socialist economics. I have a background in Chinese history (and lived there briefly). China is good for economic history in terms of being extreme (Great Leap communes, etc.) but the planning period is fairly brief compared to the Soviets and was mostly derivative. Likewise, a lot of countries in Eastern Europe experimented a lot with market sorts of institutions, which interests me somewhat less than the high Stalinist sort of Soviet model. So the obvious thing would be to learn Russian and focus on Soviet history, but it might be hard to learn Russian quickly and there is no real Russian program at Concordia in Montreal, so I couldn’t use it for grades. There is a Russian program at McGill but McGill won’t let me in.
Another option would be to focus on German first, possibly taking a German certificate or something, and then aim to do an MA on the East German economy. I took German in high school and I would feel confident in learning this fairly quickly. Then over time I could transition to take other languages while I was in grad school.
Now I expect this to take a few years to work out and get into a real grad program, and I have a basic structure of reading I could do for each area depending on the priority, but it’s hard to decide what works best. My intuition would be just to learn Russian and focus on Sovietology and run with that. But I dunno if that’s efficient.
I would say be cautious with trying to embark and endeavor that involves learning a new language in your 30s that ISNT the language they speak where you live or near you. What I'm saying is take what you can get and learn French and then try to do something with that. Go to Africa or something bruh
EmanuelaOrlandi posted:I'm actually in a very similar situation to you. BA in Linguistics I just need to pay off a library fee and apply for and a year of post-BA research assistant work that would actually look good, but I am totally not interested in going further with Ling and made no relationships in college with professors or whatever / shitty GPA because I was just doing drugs (not exactly being mental but still a distraction) I want to go back for architecture or urban planning but that seems like a lot of work.
I would say be cautious with trying to embark and endeavor that involves learning a new language in your 30s that ISNT the language they speak where you live or near you. What I'm saying is take what you can get and learn French and then try to do something with that. Go to Africa or something bruh
thanks. i will continue to learn french in any case. as you might imagine, they have incredible resources/professors teaching quebec economic history here. i have thought that it might be good to work on that - french, quebec history, and economic history more generally, and then use that background to study modern economic planning (of a capitalist sort) in 20th century quebec or something. but that's pretty far afield of socialist planning so i'm not sure i'd be as interested right away. i'll think about it more though.
littlegreenpills posted:If you want to take Russian self-study for reading to a sort of high intermediate level that'll leave you capable of handling academic papers as long as you're armed with a dictionary (although with glacial slowness), you could do worse than http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Reading-Patricia-Arant/dp/0893570869 which I got a lot of use out of until I got lazy and left it alone for a month and had to give it back to the library. It's only a step but it would get you a lot of the way to fulfilling Russian language requirements I think. It would probably depend how they assess things on your application though.
that's cool, thanks.
babyhueypnewton posted:Sounds like you'll make a great bourgeois academic. Strive for the best, you might even be the next Jung Chang!
says the general manager at an H&M lol
babyhueypnewton posted:Sounds like you'll make a great bourgeois academic. Strive for the best, you might even be the next Jung Chang!
huey, why you gotta be like that!
discipline posted:also why don't you ask noted PhD student M.A. Krul about this? because he has a MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics
yeah i might, thanks.
thirdplace posted:in a place that is otherwise so critical of capitalist myths its remarkable that we're all still determined to find a form of paid labor that will define and satisfy us
i'm not sure i'd be able to work at most jobs due to my brain problems, it's more that i need structure to do the sort of studying that i want to do, like mentorship and such.
littlegreenpills posted:Donald, I've just had a thought; you might want to look into the Open University as an option. Check out some syllabuses, figure out the fees, see if it'll be worth it for at least an MA. Or you might find you need to be physically going to the same building as your mentor for proper guidance and everything, but do think about it
at open university you have to focus on local british history apparently for a MA. they don't have politics MAs too i don't think.
swirlsofhistory posted:hey gf have you considered public policy at all? it seems like the technocratic thing you get a kick out of. you're a decent writer, you have a relevant educational background, and you can get paid to do it unlike a hobby in collecting degrees.
yeah i've had a few policy-sorta-like positions before and i know a fair bit about it. the problem tends to be that it is crassly partisan here so basically the only jobs are in either arguing for or against the government in ludicrous terms or producing really boring papers about how we need to invest more in infrastructure or something. which is fine i just don't get all that fired up about it. i'd like to learn more about development but that whole industry is a minefield of craziness so i dunno.
Edited by DrMortezaMohit ()
ggw posted:you should probably get another hobby other than collecting college degrees in useless shit. You can at least make some decent money collecting stamps or coins, come on.
because i'm a mental and low-income the government will probably pay for school if i go back.
ggw posted:what's the point of going back? get out of your comfort zone
i want to study certain things in a structured and disciplined way with peer and professional support and it probably makes sense to do that in a program, and i find school way easier to do than working, although either causes panic attacks a lot.
Keven posted:I have a friend who got a degree in philosophy and then went back 2 the same school 6 months later for electrical engineering but its going to take him a billion years b/c theres zero class overlap outside the core money theft classes and he can only take liek 12 creds max a semester. Meanwhile, Keven got himself a series of night jobs... lets just say that next time you're watching a movie at night and you think for a split second you saw a big, juicy cock right when the snooty dog and the cat meet in reel 2... that was me.
lol
ggw posted:but why do you want to go back to college/university to study something again? You've already done that. Move on with your life, imo. there are other things in this world to learn that are outside the realm of insular academia
well i want to understand the things involved because i care about the issues that they bring up and i think they are relevant to people's lives.
ggw posted:So what are you gonna do after you study these subjects? Will they have filled the void within you?
i'm going to try to relate them to contemporary debates i guess and teach people about what i've learned. what else is there to do.