My wife is taking a two-year work contract in London.
I don’t have anything lined up, but I’m interested in getting a master’s degree in English.
Does anyone have any recommendations on which schools I should be looking into or avoiding?
Yeah, I know I could have used Google, but I figured the collective wisdom of the Singletrack forum would get me heading in the right direction sooner.
FWIW, I already have a master’s of journalism, but that’s kind of like being a harpsichord player – there’s not a lot of demand.
Your journalism masters isn't useful, so you fancy getting one in English? Sounds like a waste of money to me...
In general though, even with relatively useless degrees, go to the best place you can get into. In London, I'd go for LSE or UCL. Otherwise, consider commuting to Cambridge or possibly Oxford.
Having said that, I think you'd be better doing something else.
Right now I teach journalism at a college in Canada. There is a better chance of promotion/permanent employment with an English degree.
So I figured I'm going to have some free time in the country that invented the language, why not make the most of it?
But yes, I'll consider myself warned.
It's best to do a litte research on this as you may find that the usual suspects of top uni's do not have the best English programmes. The LSE for example doesn't spring to mind as a place I associate with doing English. Add to your list Kings and Goldsmiths, but do ensure you have a close look at their programmes as by enrolling blindly you may end up studying a disproportionate amount of medieval literature (or other niche interest) that you may have no interest in.
In general though, even with relatively useless degrees, go to the best place you can get into. In London, I'd go for LSE or UCL. Otherwise, consider commuting to Cambridge or possibly Oxford.
LSE only does a limited range of courses with an economics / social / political angle. I don't think they even have an English department. I know from experience that Oxford and Cambridge are nice places to learn at, but they are absolutely not always best for every course and can be extremely old fashioned. For example in my subject, Oxford have a rep for being extremely traditionalist, whereas Cambridge is about cutting edge research, so I'd never bother going to Oxford for the kind of stuff I do.
Basically I'd say ignore any advice about universities that isn't considering subjects, like that list above, because some universities specialize in particular subjects, and particularly at masters level, other universities will be better. There is also often a lot of snobbery in them, for example in London, Queen Mary is very good at quite a lot of things (better than Kings, UCL etc. for many subjects), but is in the East End of London which means it gets recommended less as some snobs don't like it, whereas UCL is pretty posh, so gets on their list.
In London, there are two tiers of universities - those that are University of London, and those that aren't. Personally, assuming you can get on a course okay, I wouldn't spend my own money on a non Uni of London course.
Within the University of London universities, there is some variation, but they are mostly okay universities. Some of them are more focused on particular things like LSE (economics etc.), Birkbeck (mature part time students), SOAS (smoking dope and hanging out in the bar*, oh and oriental studies) etc. Be aware that Royal Holloway is not in London (realistically going to be an hour's journey from many parts of London, and the trains aren't that convenient), and possibly doesn't have quite such a good reputation, although I don't know about English.
For a masters, you will be doing something specialist. So, one thing you want to do if you know you want to live and work in London, is look at all the masters courses at all the University of London places, and see who is doing ones that sound interesting.
List of the places here:
http://www.london.ac.uk/colleges_institutes.html
Also, for postgrad stuff, the quality of the people teaching you should make a big difference - one way of looking at this is by looking at research rankings - here are the last lot - there are a bunch of London ones in the top 20 for English:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/table/2008/dec/18/rae-2008-english-degree
Oh, and one thing I can't emphasise more, is don't be shy about phoning up or emailing and asking questions about courses. You're thinking of spending vast amounts of money, and 2 years of your life, you've got to be certain about what you're doing. Also, make sure you have all dates and deadlines clear, so you actually get on whatever course it is.
If either you're non-British, or you've been living abroad for greater than 3 years, you may well count as a foreign student, if in doubt, read all the bumph carefully and check with admissions tutors to find out what your status is before you get a big money shock (extra £10k a year on some courses).
Joe
*or at least they always used to have the reputation as the stoner university.
Guys, thanks for all the info.
Cambridge and Oxford would certainly pad my CV, but the commute would kill me.
Does the LSE not sit within the UofL?
I always thought it was one of the20+ institutions that made up the UofL?
Ed
Cambridge can be easily commuted , depending on where you are in town. A friend commutes to the City daily. Yours might be easier, as it would be on emptier trains!
Depending on where you live in London, the commute OUT to Oxford isn't too bad. Buses run every 10 min from Victoria, pick up near Baker St and a few other places. Bikes can be taken on the buses.
If you are reading English, it's 1:40 per day for reading, which can't be a bad use of your time, surely? You will miss out on the social life though.
Does the LSE not sit within the UofL?
Like I said up there, LSE is part of the Uni of London, but it only has a limited set of departments, so probably won't offer what you want unless you want to study political stuff.
If you're interested in Cambridge and Oxford, you should be aware that they mostly don't do 2 year masters courses, only 9-12 month MPhil or M St. courses. Oh and that whilst it is commutable, it is going to cost four grand a year for a season ticket or something around that.
I also would totally not recommend doing a degree at an Oxbridge university without living in the city at least in the week - their systems are very much geared towards students living extremely close to where they work, and there is not much flexibility from the uni, and you will be expected to be flexible if they want to mess things around (when I was an undergraduate they even used to specify a certain maximum distance away that you were allowed to live, I don't know if that counts for taught postgrads too).
But really, like I almost said in the post above, all the advice in the various posts above is pointless and completely lacking in value until you know what kind of masters you want to do. For a Masters, it is much more a combination of good department and the right kind of course - there isn't usually just a 'masters in English' for a subject which every department will teach, there'll be various 'Masters in some subsection of English', and the range of them offered by each university will differ. You should be looking at the various English depts in the University of London (and Oxbridge if you want a shorter course), and see if any of them have something that grabs your fancy.
Bear in mind that particularly in subjects with few obvious career prospects such as English, Masters courses can be really quite hard to get onto, particularly at good universities, so you may not get your first choice. You being a foreign student willing to pay 15 grand a year is supposed to help slightly at some universities, although I don't know how true that is.