Question: what must you do for a masters in science

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 20 Nov 2014:

If you want to do a masters in science, you probably need to have gone through college once already and gotten a degree, diploma or cert. You need a decent working knowledge of science and a previous degree is a good sign of that, but you could probably get into a course with really good leaving cert results and a little luck. Having experience in a science-related job helps a lot too, so if you were able to get a part time or summer job helping in a lab, or helping a researcher with field work, that would count in your favour.

What you do during the masters varies a lot. Some are taught courses, meaning you have regular classes and exams, a bit like school, and you usually have a big research project in the last few months of it to show that you can use what you’ve been learning. Others are pure research courses, where you go to a supervisor with an idea for finding something out, and then spend the next year or two purely working on that, with no classes (or very few, anyway).

Either way, doing a masters is a lot of work. My masters was a taught course, and I was usually in college at 9am and didn’t get to leave until 6pm, the day was full of classes and practical work. There were plenty of assignments to complete as well outside those hours, which kept me up until 1 or 2 in the morning a few times. But still, I was learning amazing stuff so I (mostly) didn’t mind! 🙂