Interview with a 2025 Manchester MSc Digital Marketing Admit

📍 Interviewee background

Claire

Bachelor's: Kaohsiung Medical University

Major: Fragrance and Cosmetic Science

Score: 80.04

Work experience: internship at a biotech company

Admitted to:

Manchester - MSc Digital Marketing

📍 Chasing the dream abroad

I've dreamed of studying abroad since I was little, and after traveling in Europe I fell in love with the pace of life there. I wanted to use a master's in the UK to challenge myself, try to become more independent, and travel around Europe during that year.

Also, during my studies I became really interested in marketing, and I decided on my career plan early: I wanted to work in cosmetics marketing. But KMU offered relatively few marketing courses, and that's when the idea of studying marketing in the UK came up. The UK is without doubt one of the best in this field. Marketing alone has lots of branches, like digital, strategic and international marketing, so you can pick the one that fits your career direction best and apply for it. For all these reasons, I decided to go abroad for further study and become someone who understands marketing much better.

📍 Worth the effort - the result

When I decided to do a master's in the UK, Manchester was already my target university. My average at the time didn't meet Manchester's threshold for applying, which made me a bit uneasy, but after talking with Harry I knew what to work on. I prepared more actively and pushed my grades up to a score that met the school's requirement. Manchester also asks for an IELTS score that meets its submission standard at the time you apply, so I signed up for the test in a hurry a month before applications opened and studied like crazy every day. In the end I got a good score in time to apply.

📍 Marketing yourself matters

I think the hardest part was constantly worrying that my grades weren't high enough while being able to do nothing about it, so I just kept worrying. Because of that, I put extra care into writing my application documents, expressing in words as much as I could of the abilities related to the program, and choosing my wording carefully. That counts as marketing yourself too, and it can give your application an edge.

📍 Why Manchester?

My reason for choosing Manchester is simple: its subject and overall rankings are both near the top, it has enough international recognition, I'd heard its marketing program is more solidly designed, and it's one of the top UK schools for business. For someone like me who plans to go back to Taiwan to work, it was the best choice.

The city was also a key factor for me. Compared with London, Manchester's cost of living is much lower, and it's a beautiful big city where daily life is convenient (even if the sun doesn't come out much). The locals are friendly to international students who don't know anyone or anything there yet. Weighing it all up, I chose the University of Manchester, which suited me in every way.

📍 The consultant matters more than the brand

Before I found Harry, I consulted a lot of study-abroad agencies, but their advice sometimes missed the point, and sometimes they pushed very safe schools on me. They were slow to reply, and basically every question got a very bureaucratic answer.

After all that, I was determined to find a consultant who was ambitious and patient. After my consultation with Harry, I realized he was the person I was looking for. He carefully analyzes each student's strengths, lays out a list of reach and safe schools for you to choose from, and patiently answers all kinds of small questions, so my application went smoothly.

📍 Do you need an IELTS prep school?

Personally, I think you can skip prep classes for listening and reading. For speaking, classes can help you use English more flexibly and get more comfortable with it, and talking with a teacher can ease the nerves of not being used to speaking English.

I took classes for writing too, but they didn't help me much, because the sentence patterns and templates the teacher taught were very difficult and hard to actually use. So later on I looked things up online and taught myself.

📍 How to prepare for listening

I recommend practicing listening at 1.2x speed to train yourself, and you must do listening and reading questions every day so you don't lose your touch. For speaking, I recommend watching IELTS Advantage on YT to see how band 9.0 speakers answer, and learning from them. For writing, I recommend downloading Simon's model essays and practicing by following his structure. Tell yourself every day that you'll write at least one Task 1 or 2, and you'll get a lot out of it!

📍 A few words for everyone

I think finding a consultant who responds right away to all your questions and problems is really important, and Harry is exactly that. Whenever I had doubts or anxiety about my application, he always got back to me promptly, even in the middle of the night. That made my application process much smoother and eased a lot of my anxiety.

I also think GPA matters, of course, but if you only decided to study abroad in your third year and your grades are just average, I'd suggest building up your extracurricular experience while keeping up with your studies. My grades weren't especially high, but I had an internship and took part in my department's project planning competition, where I won first place, and in the end I got the Manchester offer I had dreamed of.

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