In my role as a Student Ambassador for Imperial College London’s ask-a-student scheme (Unibuddy), I have helped to answer questions from various prospective university students and offer holders regarding my experiences at university and living in London.
To provide some context, I am currently an MSc Management student at the Imperial College Business School, and I’ve previously completed a three-year BSc Biochemistry degree at Imperial College London. So, interestingly, one of the most common questions that I’ve received is: how is it like to transition from a science degree to an arts degree?
With that in mind, I thought that writing this article might be helpful!
What does the MSc Management degree involve?
To briefly summarise, the MSc Management programme is essentially an intense (no kidding here) one-year course that is meant to equip you with all the fundamental and practical business concepts. You could technically equate the programme to a crash course for multiple commerce-related subjects, thus it is best suited for students who have very little/no prior educational background in business.
The programme first begins with the entire cohort studying the same core modules, which form the backbone of the course. Such modules include Accounting, Business Economics, Organisational Behaviour, and Corporate Finance (just to name a few). This is followed by studying elective modules, where you get to specialise in a certain stream that aligns with your career aspirations and/or learning goals (e.g. Finance, Marketing, or Innovation).
Besides that, in between those electives, you could apply to participate in the Global Immersion elective (where you get to travel overseas to visit a certain city) or the Study Abroad elective (which is an opportunity for you to study at one of the Business School’s partner universities). Not to mention, there are various other learning opportunities such as opting to complete a work placement (i.e. internship) or take part in a consulting project.
Just as I finish writing up the previous paragraph, you might have gathered that the workload for this course is pretty heavy. And I am not going to deny – you’re absolutely right!
Hence, there are a couple of things that I thought would be worthwhile for you to know if you happen to be a STEM undergraduate hoping to pursue a business-related Master’s straight after graduation.
You’ll still need to dedicate hard work
In my opinion, if someone were to tell you that completing a business degree requires zero effort, that is a myth.
The reason for that is – although there are certain aspects of the course that focuses more on cultivating creativity or testing your ability to justify your arguments, there are also certain modules that are more fact-driven (such as Business Economics). And on a lighter note, it honestly took me quite a while to finally learn how to balance a balance sheet for Accounting. Thus, learning all of these may take some time for certain people.
Therefore, you’ll still need to be a proactive learner and have impeccable time management skills so that you can gain a clear understanding of all the topics covered just in time for your examinations.
There is a lot more focus on having good teamwork
In essence, I have had way more group projects during the first term of my Master’s programme in comparison to the three years of my undergraduate degree combined. In particular, at the start of the programme, we get assigned to teams of approximately five people (known as “syndicate groups”), and basically – whenever we have a group assignment, we’ll need to work together with our syndicate groups to complete it.
As much as how this may sound scary for a number of us (myself included), I would say that this new approach would be a relatively accurate reflection of the real work environment, whereby you’ll probably need to learn how to get along well with your future teammates to complete whatever tasks that you’re set to do.
In my experience so far as a Master’s student, despite having to work long hours and face disagreements at times, the entire journey has pushed me to become more open-minded and I learnt a lot about how to coordinate with my team so that we can play according to our strengths. And luckily for me, I soon realised that everyone’s actually pretty friendly and eager to help you and the team out!
My final remarks
All in all, I would still say that transitioning into my Master’s programme from my science background does have its unique set of challenges, but it really isn’t that bad as long as you put in the hard work needed to get up to speed.
On the contrary, I think that doing a STEM degree actually gives you a lot of transferable skills (e.g. presentation, skills, ability to think critically, analytical skills) that would hugely supplement your performance during your Master’s programme. Not to mention, having a STEM background on top of a business degree would help you to broaden your perspectives and skillsets, which in turn will greatly enhance your career prospects!
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