Interview: A 2024 Admit to Manchester's MSc IHRM & ICR

📍 About the interviewee

Irene

Bachelor's: National Chung Cheng University

Major: Social Welfare

Average: GPA 3.81 / 4.3

IELTS: Overall 7.0

Admitted to:

Manchester - MSc International Human Resource Management and Comparative Industrial Relations

KCL - MSc Human Resource Management & Organizational Analysis

Leeds - MSc Data Analytics and Human Resources Management

Bath - MSc Human Resource Management

Sheffield - MSc Human Resource Management

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📍 Why the UK?

A UK master's usually takes just one year, which cuts the time and money you need to invest and gets you into the workforce sooner. Compared with the US emphasis on generalist education, the UK puts more weight on specialist training, so you can focus your studies on the area you're interested in. Another reason: I visited the UK on a trip in junior high and fell in love with the atmosphere there. I also see the UK as a country with deep cultural roots, and with its convenient transportation and great location, I could travel to other European countries while studying. In the end, that's why I chose to study in the UK

📍 Why Manchester?

The main reason is still future employment: whether I stay abroad or go back to Taiwan to find work, Manchester is relatively helpful. Its business school is also fairly well known in the UK, and both its faculty and its rich academic resources are highly regarded internationally. Another reason is that my current university is in a fairly rural area and I'd already spent four years there, so for my master's I wanted a city with great amenities, diverse food options and a convenient location. And compared with London's higher living and housing costs, Manchester suited me better.

📍 The hardest part was...:

Few people around me had studied abroad, so I figured out a lot of things on my own, like going to study-abroad fairs and related talks and looking things up online. Early on in my IELTS prep I was often on my own too, and sometimes I lost motivation and wondered whether all this effort was really worth it. Later, though, I found an online study group, so at least I could prepare with people who had the same goal, and it felt less lonely. Also, during the semester, besides preparing for IELTS I had to keep up my grades, which could be pretty exhausting.

📍 Should you go to a prep school for IELTS?

At first I had no direction preparing for IELTS, but a prep school helped me understand test-taking techniques and methods more precisely, so going to one isn't a bad thing. I chose 戴爾 prep school, because I had classes at school Monday through Thursday and could only go back to Tainan for classes Friday through Sunday. Conveniently, the listening and speaking classes were on Friday evenings, and I could take reading and writing as correspondence courses. I think speaking takes face-to-face practice with people to learn how to structure a logical spoken answer, while reading and writing come down to building your vocabulary day to day and practicing lots of questions.

📍 How to prepare for IELTS listening and reading?

For listening, I listened to podcasts in my free time every day, for example BBC Global News, TED Talks Daily, or podcasters discussing topics I'm interested in. When practicing listening questions, I'd deliberately speed it up to 1.5x, so even if I got nervous in the exam I wouldn't be completely lost. For reading, I read English news I was interested in every day (current-affairs outlets like BBC and CNN), and only occasionally picked harder articles from The Economist or News. Before the exam, I worked through lots of official Cambridge IELTS practice tests, at least one or two sets a day.

📍 How I chose an agency

My criteria for choosing a study-abroad agency were response speed and experience. If they reply slowly, you waste a lot of time communicating and they can't clear up your questions in time. I originally went with a large agency, and they took a long time to answer my questions and rarely shared relevant information proactively or tracked how my documents were coming along. Experience matters because an experienced consultant can give me more detailed information about a school or program during consultations, or draw on former students to share some experience with me.

📍 A few words for everyone

For anyone planning to apply: first and foremost, keep your grades up and start preparing for IELTS early, so you'll have more schools to choose from when you apply. In the second semester of your junior year, you can start looking for a suitable agency and choosing the schools you want to attend, so you'll have more time over the summer to write your CV and SOP, express your motivation more fully in your documents and describe your college experiences more completely. I'd also suggest asking your department's professors for recommendation letters before the summer, because some professors get busy once the semester starts and the back-and-forth emails can eat up a lot of time. To avoid racing against application deadlines, preparing early is the best approach.

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