Part-Time vs. Full-Time Master Program: Whether paying for less sleep is a good idea.
By: Dennis_Till Authors
Tags: Part Time Studies, Purpose, Best Practices, Master Studies, Career Advice

1) What drives your decision to prefer a part-time program?

The first thing you should discover is the purpose of the master-studies you want to establish as the basis for your endeavour. Depending on your personal why [ For more on “the why” refer to Simon Sinek and his “Golden Circle” https://simonsinek.com/commit/the-golden-circle] with regard to your master, you might want to consider programs that differ significantly. To determine your why, discovering three sub-topics can be helpful: Door-opening power of the degree you’re aiming at, Financial conditions, and Your willingness to challenge yourself.

Door-opening power

You should consider what reputation the institution and the master’s degree you’re aiming at should incorporate. Are you searching for a respectable institution in academia or is it just the idea of having some kind of master degree you’re searching for. Aiming at the first, you might take a look at the accreditation, recent publications or even the professors at your desired institution.

Another fact to consider with regards to the door-opening power is the network of alumni the institution can provide you with. Especially studying at a business school, the alumni network can be counted in as a valuable asset when looking at career opportunities.

Financials

Conducting your master’s part-time is an endeavour that demands a certain financial basis. Costs for the mere study program range from a few hundred to easily more than a thousand euros per month [ Besides scanning the program brochures of different institutions your could also stick to pages like https://www.studieren-berufsbegleitend.de/kosten-finanzierung/ueberblick-kosten/#kosten-ueberblick (GER) or https://www.squeaker.net/de/Studium/Hochschule (GER) for rough overviews.]. Even though — at least in Germany — a reasonable share of these costs are tax deductible, it’s still an investment you need to consider in advance. Consequently, aiming to do your master’s at a certain institution, the only way to finance it might be working in parallel.

Another reason might just lie in the factor that you’ve already worked for several years and reached a certain living standard in consequence — a quite human factor if you’d ask us. Studying full-time means to step back from your career path working part-time at most. This consequently means — well at least if you’re not a successful part-time crypto-trader or else — waiving the opportunity of earning a significant amount of money you might have gotten used to during the last years. As the living standard you earned, the kind of living situation you build up or other earned amenities might be (at least to some extent) some backbone to refer to, you might want to consider how strong you’re willing and/or able to relinquish these.

If you ask us, we did see working full-time besides our studies as an opportunity to pursue a master’s that did fit our demands. We were able to conduct this master in financing it with the remuneration we earned — hence, we did consider this as investment in our future.

Willingness to challenge yourself

Having decided to pursue your masters` in parallel to your job you might want to consider how much you’re willing to challenge yourself. Considering the institution the need to do so might differ significantly.

To find out your own willingness to challenge yourself, you could stick to comparable situations. Being a sports person you could for example easily relate to preparation programs for competitions. Challenging yourself might not only get you a certain title but might also let you discover your own borders and grow beyond them. In contrast just training regularly might keep you in shape and increase your health conditions without the need to challenge yourself in more extreme ways.

Growing beyond your own borders might include getting out of your comfort zone — not only with regards to effort put in a certain topic but also with regards to learning something new.

Okay, nice you might think — now I read a lot of stuff, but why the heck do I need my own why [ For a concept of “your personal why” refer to John Strelecky and his “Zweck der Existenz (ZDE) [purpose]” e.g. presented in Kaffee am Rande der Welt.]. Well, simply put: It might help you to survive sometimes. It might not be surprising that there might come times you might only see a lot of work. In these times you might even wonder why you’re doing all this. Exactly for these situations you should always remember your own personal why.

A good practice to find out exemplarily the “willingness to challenge/institution-match” could be to build a graph scaling from zero to ten, with zero coding for “not so challenging studies” and ten coding for “hard study program”. In the next step you think about your own goals with the study you’re aiming at and arrange yourself on the scale. You might then want to search for possible institutions/programs and arrange them on the same scale. For information on the institutions you can easily use forums. In following this approach you quite easily find which institutions/programs match your willingness to challenge yourself.

[Brief note: You can apply a certain visualization/coding of factors for several decisions. For some people, it works as a helpful tool to kind of rationalize not fully rational arguments. That might lie a valuable basis for the decisions that might need to be taken]