Hey everyone! Apa khabar? 🙂 Selamat menjalankan ibadah puasa for all my Malay friends back home. Oh how much I miss the times going to Ramadhan Bazaars at this time of the year buying loads of foods like ayam percik, kuih-muih, keropok lekor, nasi dagang and many more for dinner. 🙁 Malaysia is still the best country on earth in terms of the variety of food offered. 😛

Back to today’s main topic. I will be sharing with all of you of how is my life here as a Masters student in Surrey. As a Masters student, we only have one full year of academic studies including dissertation writing. Therefore, it is really important to utilize every minute of your time here wisely to ensure you get the most out of your stay here. Time really flies and in a blink of an eye it had been 9 months since I arrived in the UK. The scene of bidding farewell to my friends and family in KLIA before boarding my first long haul flight to UK is still so clearly imprinted in my mind like it just happened yesterday. 🙁

Okay. Let me start by briefly introducing how a Masters degree (to be specific, the MScs for Surrey Business School as I’m from the Business School) is structured here in Surrey. There are generally 3 semesters for the academic year, with 2 semesters of taught lectures and seminars and 1 extra semester during the summer holidays to write our dissertation. We generally have 4 modules/subjects for every semesters except the third one. Each modules usually consists of 2 hours of lecture and 1 hour of seminar per week, which totals up to about 12 hours of classes per week for all 4 modules. For my course, most of the modules have a mixture of assessment methods of courseworks (group/individual assignments or mid term exams) and final exams.

As for the third semester for dissertation writing, you do not have any lectures or classes to attend. The dissertation writing process actually starts during the second semester and thus that semester will be the busiest time of the year. The first part of the dissertation writing process starts with choosing a topic for your dissertation and drafting the dissertation proposal. For MSc International Business students, we actually have a very wide field to choose from such as focusing on international trade, entrepreneurship, marketing, consumer behavior, human resources (this is the one that I have chosen! 😛 ) and etc. A supervisor will then be allocated to you according to the topic and field that you have chosen. We will then meet up with our supervisor to further discuss on the feasibility of our dissertation topic and proceed with writing literature review, which the school aims that we will finish the part by the end of second semester. The role of supervisor finishes here and then the school will set up dissertation clinics whereby you are allowed to attend 3 times during the third semester to discuss the remaining parts of the dissertation with academics in school or through Skype. Submission of dissertation will be around beginning of September and then you’re officially done! Graduation ceremony will be in April the following year so most people will be celebrating by travelling or going back home before coming back again for graduation. 🙂

So, only 12 hours of classes per week. What do you do during your free time? We usually only have 4 days of classes per week and Wednesdays are usually free for us. That is the day that I will do my blogging or participate in societies and clubs or even go for day trips to London or surrounding areas. During the rest of the weekdays, most of the classes are morning classes, so I will usually wake up at around 8am during weekdays to have breakfast and prepare for 9am lectures. I will then come back to my accommodation to cook lunch before attending the next lecture. Classes usually ends at 5 or 6pm latest and then it will be free time for us. At Wednesday and Thursday nights I usually attend bible study or connect group meetings organised by local church and rest of the days I will either go to the gym to work out or do my assignments or revision in my room or in the library. During the weekends, I’ll usually rest at home or go to town to walk around the markets during Saturdays and attend church on Sundays.

I guess that is all about my life here in uni. Do drop me an email at malaysia@surrey.ac.uk if you have any further inquiries or leave a comment below! And oh, do comment or give suggestions on anything that you might want to know and I might blog it in my next post 🙂 Time to go back and continue on my dissertation writing as my family will be arriving tomorrow at London and we will be doing a little travelling around Europe including Italy, Budapest, Vienna and Prague before coming back to UK to attend my brother’s convocation in mid July (congratulations to my brother as he has gotten a 2.1 degree in his BSc Actuarial Science study in University of Kent 🙂 ).

See you guys again soon and take care.

Jumpa lagi and salam sejahtera!

Love xx

Adeline

p/s: I’ve gotten an outstanding contribution award from the Student Ambassadors Awards. Thank you so much to all the lovely people in the International Recruitment team and I wouldn’t have gotten this without your encouragement. 🙂