Hi,

I have recently started studying towards an MA in Marketing following my BA degree in the same subject. I do genuinely njoy various aspects of the subject and there are areas that i am not so keen on giving it is a rather wide area. Throughout my BA degree i rarely got near a first but managed to pull out a good 2:1. I have never struggled with work before and have never really gotten marks below a certain point but the BA was a wake up, part of me thought i must be getting dumber with other people around me suddenly finding something in themselves. I had always said i wanted to try postgraduate though and went straight onto this MA full time. Ever since it began a couple of months ago all i have heard from the lecturers is how much of a big step up it is from undergraduate and how hard it is and how it is almost impossible to get a distinction. From people out there who are currently doing or have completed an MA is this really true? It's so frustrating as they do not want to tell us exactly what we need to do to go up a level all that is said is reading journals but i did this for undergraduate for every single piece of work i did so i am a little bit confused. I also received a distinction, just, for my first piece of work last week but all the feedback received was positive which has left me wondering where marks were lost so what do we actually have to do to get that distinction.

3 weeks away from two exams and a large essay due in i am beginning to lose motivation, questioning whether it can be done at all. I am worried that the essays i am submitting are not going up a level and are just me stuck in the pattern of undergraduate.

Any help or advice would be brilliant from anyone,
Thank you :-)

I did an MA a couple of years back after getting a 2:2 for my first undergrad degree. I was also told the same things re 'it's almost impossible' 'hardly anyone gets one' yada yada yada. The way I saw it, they had said 'almost' impossible not, 'totally'. We didn't get any tips either except 'read lots of journal articles' but there's a real difference between reading a journal article and READING a journal article. The way I approached the MA was to find out who were the big/established names in the field that I was looking at and read their work, then I expanded into looking at other people's work and what the range of views were and why people might have those views and what they said about the big names. Then I read everything again critically appraising what had been done, what hadn't been done and what I would have done (all backed up with research evidence obviously). Getting to grips with the important issues and having my own thoughts that were logical and based in empirical evidence plus an understanding of the terminology and conventions of writing are all what earned me a Distinction at Masters level. I didn't just read articles, I also read specialist books, policy documents and all sorts of things that had come up time and time again in the references of the articles I had read.
At undergrad I just read superfluously and then regurgitated what I had read - no critical appraisal, no insight, no thought. I didn't make that mistake for my second undergrad and it paid off there too.

It is NOT impossible to get a distinction. It is certainly challenging but it's not beyond the pale and it can be done with hard work and motivation. It depends on how badly you want that distinction. I was basically not prepared to leave without one and that drove me to make up for my appalling performance in my first degree. The MA was really a revenge against myself to prove that I could do something properly if I really wanted to.

Good luck with your studies and I hope you get what you want!