Hi, my name is Esther and I started with the EST program in February 2019. The reason that I started in February had nothing to do with the premaster or finishing my bachelor's. The reason was that I had already started with another master’s program at another university, but during the first months of the other program, I kept thinking about EST.
Following two masters simultaneously: Leiden University and University of Twente
I did my bachelor’s degree in Pedagogical Sciences in which I focused on pedagogy (child-rearing) and Educational Sciences. In the end, I still wasn't sure about which of the two directions I would go for. The first master I choose is aimed at pedagogy. I'm currently following this program at the University of Leiden and started in September 2018. Hopefully, I will graduate around March 2020 (this has to do with the internship that will finish around that time). But when I was a few months into this program I realised that I still had an interest in education.
This interest caused me to think about following another master’s program. After doing some research I found out that the cheapest way to do two masters, in my situation, would be following them at the same time. So, there would be at least half a school year overlap between the two. Initially, I wanted to finish my pedagogy masters in July 2019, but that didn’t work out, unfortunately, because of extra subjects (for a Dutch registration) and difficulties with finding an internship spot (part of the mandatory program). However, because I initially wanted to finish in July, I had to start with EST in February (I didn't need to do the premaster so that didn't cause any problems with my plans).
Struggles with following two masters simultaneously
So, since February 2019 I’m doing two master programs at the same time. If you look purely at the EC's it would be possible to do two one-year masters in two years, but, it’s a little bit more difficult. The first problem started in period 2b 2019. In both programs, the contact hours are on Monday and Tuesday, which resulted in having lectures at the same time at different locations in the Netherlands. Luckily, none of the lectures was mandatory, but I was still missing lectures. So, every week I had the choice to which one of the lectures I wanted to go based on things like presentations, guest lectures and the possibility to copy the notes of someone else. Currently, this isn’t really a problem for me anymore because I have finished all the subjects with lectures in Leiden. Now, I only have an internship and thesis meetings left. This was done intentionally so that the clash in the lecture schedule would be minimal.
Following two masters simultaneously is possible: my advice
There are also a couple of things that I would like to say to people who think two masters would be too difficult for them for various reasons. First of all, I’m not that smart. Well, I have a bachelor’s degree, so I’m not that stupid either, but I am not even close to having the highest grades. I think the average of my bachelor’s degree was around 6,5 and this didn’t change much during my masters. Despite this, I don’t have a feeling that all of it is overwhelming.
Second, you might think that is because of my amazing scheduling skills that it is possible to do two masters. I can make a good and realistic planning, but I have never actually kept myself to the planning. I’m terrible at it. Over time I’m getting better at it, but it’s still not a thing I’m good at. I’ve tried several ways of planning and I think that the best way for me turned out to be to calculate how many hours I have left in a week and distribute this over what I’m supposed to do. I do this at the beginning of the week, and I combine it with making a to-do list at the start of every day.