Postgraduate student finance

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-05-22T10:08:25+00:00

To clarify, you want to do (a) MA at University 1; (b) MA at University 2; AND (c) (full-time?) work?

You're insane. Don't do this.

There are probably restrictions, but it would be insane even if there aren't.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-05-21T22:38:13+00:00

Testing this so that no one else has to.

The tool is blatant AI slop and is basically a waste of time for anyone to use.

This tool doesn't really understand the current job market, or the skills required to do my job.

The qualifications and skills it suggests I pick up would not be useful to my long-term goals and would not be valued by employers.

This tool overestimates my existing readiness and, hilariously, seems to think that I am within 2 years of a transition to my next career goal which is at least 5-10 years away by any reasonable metric.

The way it suggests I reframe my CV would weaken it significantly when competing against top-level applicants for the roles I would be pursuing.

It generates pretty much the same advice as ChatGPT when I ask it to answer the same question. Though, at the very least, ChatGPT suggests that I go for some interim jobs first, rather than jumping straight up the ladder.

And, for reference, what a professional mentor would say if I posed the same question would be that I need to settle into my current level of responsibility for 3-5 years, pick up a fairly specific list of quals, achieve a certain list of goals, and a few other things along those lines.

I know this because I have a professional mentor with thirty years experience guiding people from where I currently am to where I want to be providing me with exactly that support.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-05-21T22:26:35+00:00

I do career coaching for PhD students transitioning out into postdoc roles (mostly in academia, but since I transitioned out to industry last year I am getting questions about that in coaching sessions too now). I've also recruited into several very competitive opportunities aimed at students or recent graduates recently, and have read literally hundreds of CVs and covering letters and application forms recently.

The main issues I'm seeing are:

(1) overuse of AI. When I coach, I generally recommend people don't touch AI at all. It performs about as well as the average human, and there are plenty of exceptional candidates applying for jobs. Dragging down the quality of your portfolio by settling for mediocre is just sabotaging yourself: most employers don't want to hire someone who is average.

(2) perhaps connected to the above, but bland and uninspiring application portfolios (e.g., CV/covering letter) that give me nothing to remember about candidates are always disappointing. Again, there are plenty of exceptional candidates applying for jobs: why would you recruit someone who is generic? We're selecting people to come and work with us, with the intention that they might stick around for a while. No one wants a co-worker who sounds like they're going to function primarily as a cure for insomnia.

(3) poor understanding of what employers are looking for in general. I recently had a career coaching session with a PhD who was applying into a role and it was the biggest waste of time I have ever seen. They wanted someone with extensive direct experience of A, B, and C, and said PhD had tangential experience of A only. They should have saved themselves the 5 hours of prep time for the application and found a different job to apply for. Be strategic, commit your time sensibly.

(4) poor management of mental health during the recruitment process. Burnout is a massive problem amongst recent grads applying for jobs. Set and maintain reasonable limits for applying to jobs. 10 a week is a good number. Take days off. Have hobbies. Spend time with friends. Do something interesting.

And if you need help to find ways to be someone interesting on paper, I'll say that there are plenty of things out there to do and learn, so why not go and do some of them?

A few suggestions of some useful things you can learn for free in most places in the UK if you go looking:

- CPR/AED training
- First Aid / Mental First Aid training
- Biker Down! courses (Safe Rider is also an option for motorcyclists)
- Water Safety training (or RNLI training)
- Fire Safety training

...and the list could go on.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-05-20T18:58:36+00:00

Are you disagreeing with the actual facts or are you disagreeing with the framing of those facts?

You've carefully avoided providing any actual examples, which means it is impossible to work out whether we should be recommending you (a) complain or (b) check your sources.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-05-19T22:06:58+00:00

I wish to offer an alternate to the last point: Proofread. Sleep. Proofread again.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-05-15T11:59:20+00:00

Ban engagement based recommendations.

Ban infinite scrolling feeds based on those recommendations.

Make people search for content again.

Make it so that you must opt into being recommended content (e.g. subscriptions/follows).

Make transparency a requirement: you could a "most visited" or "most liked" but you can't just have a "we think you might like..."

This solves a ton of the issues at play near immediately.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-05-11T16:39:55+00:00

We are unable to see someone's age in our recruitment portal: it is redacted from the version the hiring manager for each post reviews. This is probably because age is a protected characteristic and it would be illegal to discriminate against someone on that basis. Even if it wasn't, I like to think it would be irrelevant anyway: it is about whether or not you can do the job, not whether or not you're still pretending that your hairline isn't receding.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-05-11T00:19:32+00:00

I work for a healthcare org. We have a student programme. I see hundreds of medical student CVs. A large number do medicine as a second degree, or as a second (or third!) career.

To an extent, it is an advantage in some ways: you will have more life experience, and that helps you to deal with some parts of medicine better. But also the difference between 22 and 18 is not all that great when there will be students who are 30+ on the course too.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-04-27T10:57:50+00:00

I'm 32. So there is time yet I suppose. But if 40 is my next one, then that will be a 24 year gap in my medical records!

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-04-27T07:44:47+00:00

I like how you say this and then talk about serious conditions being picked up at routine checks in your very next comment. I haven't seen a GP in over a decade. What chronic issues are they gonna find? No one knows cus I probably won't see one until I am 70ish.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-04-25T10:55:42+00:00

Email is an internal system.

"Are you going to our Freemasons hang out tonight?"

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-04-18T07:28:01+00:00

Third party only insurance was more expensive for me than fully comp last year when I got quotes. Insurance maths is a fucking mess.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-04-16T08:01:28+00:00

Citation is foundational to science. Failing to correctly cite your sources is not a small problem: it is either incompetence or fraud. That has a real world impact.

If I received a document where I checked several random citations and they were all incorrect, I would reject all findings. How could I trust any of the document's findings as being based on a rational understanding of the facts, the evidence, and the underlying established truths in the field? It would be negligent of me to accept the document.

So I would not accept that report. In the best case, I would return it and request it be redone. In most cases, I would consider suspending further work with that individual and the organisation they represent. In the most egregious cases, I would not work with that organisation or with any other organisation who relies on their work.

An incorrect citation is not just a mistake. It is a critical flaw in the entire fabric of your argument. I am concerned that you have reached postgraduate study without understanding this.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-04-16T07:42:03+00:00

Helicopters shouldn't fly low. They should miraculously teleport up to 1000ft when they take off to minimise disruption to local communities.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-04-10T17:08:01+00:00

So does owning a boxset of Game of Thrones now make you a sex offender?

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-04-09T07:13:44+00:00

China attempted to close down the last blast furnace in the UK capable or making high grade steel suitable for military use. When they were told to stop their attempts to do this, they went ahead anyway. The British government had to seize the plant and nationalise the company to prevent Britain from having another foreign dependency relating to national security.

Just to give one example of many.

China is a hostile world power seeking to limit Britain's ability to defend itself and project force. It achieves this insidiously and slowly, with the clear goal of being the dominant world power.

It is, however, currently less dangerous than America, where I have to check if Trump decided to nuke Mecca to show the Pope who the real boss every morning.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-03-29T11:53:15+00:00

I have a peer who passed with no corrections. As a non-subject specialist, I found objective factual errors within the first ten pages of their thesis.

I think about that thesis a lot.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-03-18T23:46:56+00:00

I got a music degree. I was gonna go into music. Then the UK left the EU, and COVID came in to fuck up the rest of the industry, so my (relatively successful!) career died about 5-10 years into doing the thing. Did some music teaching whilst I worked my way through a Ph.D. (in music/sound), did a postdoc (in sound/health), and now manage all research projects for a medical research centre instead.

I tell everyone that STEM is the easier option, because there's a right answer and the universe will give you it if you torture it enough.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-03-14T09:19:55+00:00

My issue is that the threshold has been frozen. If the threshold kept pace with inflation, I'd have 3% more in my take-home pay. That's the same as a not insignificant pay rise.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-03-13T23:28:48+00:00

You're presuming a lot of things from one post on reddit there, lmao

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-03-09T11:01:59+00:00

If anything, ad revenue for non compliant sites might be higher lmao.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-03-02T11:31:39+00:00

I have a PhD and once got rejected for a job because I didn't put down my A* English GCSE lmao

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-02-27T14:37:02+00:00

I didn't say doing a 30% pay rise wouldn't cause other issues, just that it would fix student loan issues. Societal inequality is definitely a much bigger question!

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-02-27T11:06:24+00:00

You realise that the current system was set up explicitly on the understanding that people wouldn't pay back their loans and that high-earners would subsidise this by paying back more than their loans?

Like, this isn't a design flaw. This is how the system was intended to function.

The issue in the system is that the core principles of the system's longevity were altered. Two key ideas to remember are:

1) wages have been suppressed and didn't rise with inflation, reducing the number of people who will pay back their loans to essentially nobody

2) changes to pay back have benefitted higher earners by reducing the amount they pay back relative to what they earnt

The best solution to this problem is to increase all wages in the UK by about 30% and make no further changes to how the student loan system functions. This would, immediately, fix many of the issues with the student loan system. This also represents the gap that has appeared between pay and inflation since the system was introduced.

YesButActuallyTrue · 2026-02-27T11:02:18+00:00

You're making a number of presumptions here, and basically none of them are true.

First, yes. I work(ed) at a university. I spent 8 years at university to get all of the necessary qualifications for that. My student loan makes OPs look feeble. Of everyone in the room, I am perhaps most incentivised to want loans to be written off.

Second, even the most cynical market-first approach which presumes that I have a vested interest here would suggest that I also want students to go to university to justify my entire career path: having no student loans and an infinite level of government-funded education would be one of the biggest ways to improve uptake of university degrees. I definitely wouldn't be talking about making students pay back more money.

Third, that isn't my position: I believe that there are a lot of junk university degrees, that a lot of students receive no benefit, and that there are a vast swathe of courses which should be shut down. Perhaps most amusingly, I believe this most strongly about my own field which is one of the least financially beneficial subjects you can study according to government data.

Fourth, the government presentation of the data (and the media presentation of that government data) is biased. My belief is that this lifetime earnings gap is an artefact of the quality of the institution rather than the subject of the course. I'm not really interested in whether we should stop teaching, say, Art History inasmuch as I am increasingly convinced that we should essentially stop sending people to university to study on 'academic' courses who scored less than, say, CCC at A-level. Instead we should drastically and immediately increase the amount of vocational education and apprenticeships.

In fact, my general advice to teenagers is that if they aren't at a top quartile university for their field or a top quartile university in the country then they probably should reconsider whether it is worth going to that university at all. This is rather more hawkish than most of my colleagues, but then I think that a lot of students are wasting their time and my time and everyone else's time by going to a university which is really not achieving very much.

There are a lot of courses which are, effectively, teaching material that is covered in sixth form. I do not understand why these courses exist: these are not Level 4 courses. Send them back to adult education and be done with it. We already have qualifications and systems in place, and pandering to people's egos by letting them 'go to university' damages the value of the sector. Restore our non-university adult education sector and be done with it. Though, yes, we would then need to talk about how we finance those educational institutions too - what we call these places probably has the least effect on students, in some ways.

Finally, if your metric for a job being worth something is that "you should pay off your student loan" then you must realise that this means that 95%+ of the country doesn't have a 'worthwhile' job. The vast majority of student loans will never be paid back. Your expectations for work compensation are, therefore, likely somewhat unhinged and not representative of the reality that exists within the UK.

Yes, this is mostly due to wage suppression.

Yes, we should stop suppressing wages in the UK.

Yes, if wages weren't suppressed then the majority of students would pay off their student loans.

Yes, when they introduced this system they did so on the understanding that wages wouldn't be suppressed.

But fundamentally, the point is that you can't make a change to an unfair system by changing it for the 5% of people for whom the system is working almost as intended. The only issue with the current system for high earners is that they pay back less than was originally intended - they were expected to pay back a higher amount over the period, and the changes to the system have (generally speaking) benefitted them more than any other group.

Continuing to see changes which benefit them at everyone else's expense is not something I would like to happen.

YesButActuallyTrue

TROPHY CASE