Graduate School

[BarrettRC8]

I've just recently been accepted to UWF's Master of Arts in Security and Diplomacy. Awesome. The catch is that I will hopefully be leaving for USMC OCS in approximately a year.

The program is 33 hours and apparently typically takes a year and a half to complete. I thought that I'd be able to knock it out in two semesters, one of 15 hours and one of 18 hours. Especially since I will be devoting my entire time to school as I will not be working during this time. My advisor thought that 12 hours would be more than enough however.

To any who have attended graduate school, is taking 15 or 18 hours really too much? Spring semester of my senior year I took 18 hours of all 4000 level classes and held a 3.75gpa for that semester. Though I really haven't had any experience with graduate classes.

And the reason that I'm not leaving sooner for OCS is that I was previously in Army ROTC and am waiting to be released from the Army, which apparently takes an inordinate amount of time, unfortunately.

 

[jscook8]

Taking 15-18 credits in graduate school would be pretty tough. My last two semesters I have taken 10-11 credits, and it is a full load. Some classes require a tremendous amount of work of a completely different caliber of undergrad classes.

I, too, took 18 credits as an undergrad for most semesters and tried to up the count my first semester of grad school. I am glad that I didn't though. This might not necessarily be true for you since my degree is science based and requires a lot of lab work but that is my two cents.

 

[BarrettRC8]

Taking 15-18 credits in graduate school would be pretty tough. My last two semesters I have taken 10-11 credits, and it is a full load. Some classes require a tremendous amount of work of a completely different caliber of undergrad classes.

I, too, took 18 credits as an undergrad for most semesters and tried to up the count my first semester of grad school. I am glad that I didn't though. This might not necessarily be true for you since my degree is science based and requires a lot of lab work but that is my two cents.

Fortunately there is no lab work for my classes, but definitely thanks for your insight from someone who has been there.

 

[Kathy]

I have an MBA and I thought the classes were comparable to undergrad. I worked full time and took (at most) 9 hours per semester and made a 4.0. I think I easily could have done 18 hours had I not been working full time.

 

[baryon]

It all depends on what kind of classes those 15-18 credits are. I'm in grad school right now, and my first year consisted of assloads (like 10-20 hrs a week) of homework (problem sets--I do math), for 9-10 credit hours. It sounds like in yours, you would write a lot of papers. If you feel confident that on average, you can write five or six 10-20 page papers every month, and do all the research/read all the books for each of them, then I say go for it. The worst that could happen is that you don't finish and still have a spot at OCS. Also, if you're very close to getting your degree, but aren't exactly sure when you're going to finish, your recruiter may be able to change your OCS date if you'd finish in that time period. At least that's what mine said to me. Not sure if that's gospel.