Going to Wollongong ... virtually

There are many universities, and many Masters courses.

A cautionary tale:

The lovely lady who got the job we had hoped for in Toowoomba is younger than us, and has a Masters. However, after giving her the job, they then put her on the lowest pay scale because her Masters was really 'no good'!

She had attained a Masters of Applied Linguistics in TESOL. If you examine this course, you will find that it looks essentially the same as the Master of Education in TESOL - pretty well same subjects, same stuff to learn, same purpose. What's wrong with it? It's not a Master of EDUCATION!

There are several other universities here in Brissie. Some of them offer a "MATE" - Master of Arts in TESOL. Some offer the Master of Applied Linguistics. But the Master of Education is a little hard to find, and we have decided that is what we want.

So, after our very expensive day, we had to decide whether to pay the extra $10000 (!) or look elsewhere. We discovered that the University of Wollongong has the course, and we phoned them to make sure they didn't have the mysterious lack of Commonwealth places.

We had been looking forward to being real students here especially after doing our Bachelors at ECU externally. (Peter thinks maybe he should grow his hair ... ) But, no biggee, we can do that again.

So at this stage we have applied to University of Wollongong to do a "distance" Master of Education.

Another good thing about that - we don't have to wait til July for the course to start. They have several starts throughout the year, and the next one is next Monday, so we can get right onto it!

The Ten Thousand Dollar Day

We were advised to apply for "Advanced Standing" at the same time as we enrolled in the course (the Master of Education in TESOL course). But we were waiting on a particular item to be sent to us before we could do that. So we waited, and we didn't enrol straight away.

We didn't realise that the person who was sending us that particular item had gone on holiday for a month, we kept believing day by day that it would arrive, and so we didn't go ahead and enrol anyway.

Finally the paper arrived, and we put in our enrolment, and our application for "Advanced Standing"

Oh no! They told us. You missed the "Commonwealth Supported" places by one day. Not that it was an announced closing day we had missed, just a mysterious decision that from that day there would be no more Commonwealth places for Master of Education courses. And we were one day too late.

Our course would have cost $2750 (each), but now we would need to be full fee paying students and it would cost $7500 (each) ... a difference of about $10 000 for the two of us. (That is for one semester - $20 000 for the 2 semesters, of course.)

Expensive day, ay?