Never Too Late: Applying As A Mature Student

You’ve filled in the forms. While waiting for your application to go through, you begin to question if it’s too late for you to restart your academic journey. You shouldn’t, and postgradasia.com is here to elaborate.
Benny Razali
Writer, postgradasia.com

If you’re worried about that your experience as a mature student may not live up to your younger student days, you should stop worrying yourself sick. If you haven’t already realised, you now have the higher ground.

Financial capability

After years as a working professional, you’ve built a steady flow of income that gives you stronger purchasing power, access to credit and savings for your own security. This means you can afford to skip fundraising for your studies this time round, and spend more energy to focus on your coursework and assignments. Now that you are older and wiser, managing and organising your finances should be much easier than it was during undergraduate days.

Knowledge base

Your working experience and personal skills developed throughout the years should provide you with organisational skills such as communication skills, negotiation skills, and knowledge that extend beyond the classroom. Your wide range of knowledge will be extremely beneficial to your study group. This will also be advantageous during discussions with your supervisor as you would be able to convey your ideas to them effectively.

Clear goals

You’ve weighed out the pros and cons of pursuing your postgrad studies. Whether you want to have a huge career change, to further enhance your skills or perhaps you want to finally take a step into the world of academia, you’ve made your decision. With a clear goal in mind, your time will be spared from experimenting different study cases or reviewing unnecessary references. This should motivate you to keep going throughout your studies.

Accessibility

As it stands, you have the advantage of accessibility in choosing a postgraduate course of your interest. Many postgraduate programmes require candidates to have a minimum of two to four years’ of working experience (eg. CFA, MBA) because management skills adds credibility to your qualifications. Leverage on your work experience as it qualifies you to enrol into a wide variety of programmes – be it taught or research.

Networks  

The professional network you’ve made in the years you were building your career creates layers of connection for you to tap in for information. This means you are exposed to a larger bank of resource, which will tremendously help in completing your study. Each person that you know within these layers brings in different ideas and perspectives that will not only become inspirations for your dissertation, but adds credibility to your research as well.

Learning is a lifelong journey, so it is definitely not too late for you to restart your education journey as a mature postgraduate student. Put the doubts and uneasiness from your mind aside; embrace your second chance at being a student again with a positive attitude.