I am already halfway through my MSc in Engineering Management. This one-year-long program has helped me to understand my abilities, including attitude, time management and planning in the context of my career aspirations. All these skills are helping me to prepare for the next stage of my career in the areas of e-commerce.
Attitude
As far as I am concerned, the aim of studying an MSc program is to deepen my understanding of areas that I am interested in and how they are related to my future career. A lot of it requires attitude and personal initiatives to drive one’s motivation. It’s not just merely telling others what you are interested in, but actually working towards fulfilling those initiatives. This MSc program stimulates students to learn many things independently and form a good habit of studying. Plus develop an attitude towards one’s initiative and focus.
Time Management and Planning
As well as developing a focused attitude, time management and planning are the other skills important in the context of driving my career aspirations. During the course of study, there are multiple assignments and project works sometimes with tight deadlines but with good support and course content to prepare in advance. The experience prepares you to make a good plan on how to allocate your time carefully and how to get your work done. You can clearly see a difference in the outcome while following a good time management plan vs cramming everything to the last minute.
Teamwork
In real life, you always need to participate in group work. In the MSc program, there is usually at least one group work in a term. I would say group work has both positive and negative sides and can be the most challenging part. Yet, I believe we are being trained to work effectively in teams before we graduate.
First, having group work can help us to learn from each other by working on a big project as a team. It is obvious that even though people working in the same group may have various working styles and characteristics, there are many things that we could learn from each other during the process. It is not always easy to work effectively at the beginning stages because people in the same group do not always have the same level of understanding, and they might not know each other well. Sometimes it might take time to communicate and understand each other within a team. Together with a good attitude, time management and planning skills, there are ways to overcome challenges one can potentially face in group work.
Techniques
As everyone knows, classes had to be held online during the pandemic. As an Engineering student, there have been plenty of opportunities to show our creativity and ability in the course of our study. The lectures in this MSc have high practicality since the lectures are not merely delivering content that we can read in books. Interactive activities also help us to develop our critical thinking skills. Following lectures, students need to apply theories they have learnt on a given topic and apply that to a particular scenario using a demonstration or a presentation on various occasions. Finally, students at a Masters level should be able to manage and handle difficult situations and make decisions using their own initiatives and advanced critical thinking.
Career
All these skills will help me to be better prepared for the next stage of my career in the sector of e-commerce. There is no doubt that there will be challenges at the beginning of work and we might face some difficulties, especially matching our skills to the job spec. Yet, we are well-trained with a good attitude to work. So even when facing difficulties, we will be able to work on these and solve the issues in the right way. Also, it is evident that some roles will need us to work on many projects at the same time. So it will be necessary to apply time management and planning skills to achieve our goal/outcome on time. Finally, some roles might require us to work remotely in the future. So the MSc has prepared me to work online as well as face-to-face.
Read more stories from Masters students
Leave a Reply