#19 - The space between degrees
How I designed a bridging year to carry me from graduate to Masters — and towards the future I want.
It has been a seriously wild week of making decisions that impact the rest of my career.
Back in August I made an application for a Masters course — the MSc in Psychology of Human Performance at Manchester Metropolitan University. It looked like it ticked every box — I mean, look at this opening line:
Explore the relationship between stress, health, and performance across diverse environments, from corporate offices to space exploration.
That’s what I’m doing! Transitioning from a corporate office to working with space explorers!
Anyway, I wasn’t entirely sure about the course location: even part time it would require being in Manchester once a week. I have family in Crewe which is only about 30 minutes away, so in my head I thought I can travel up there and stay with them overnight.
However, reality hit when I got an unconditional offer and realised no, I don’t want to be travelling up to Manchester every week. It’s 3.5 hours each way. I called Admissions to learn what the schedule was and if there was any wiggle room. There was not. So in the end, the right course in the wrong location can still be the wrong course.
And then last Friday I learned that someone I used to work with, who I considered a mentor and inspiration, had passed away quite suddenly.
It shook my world.
Even though we hadn’t spoken for a good few years, I never forgot the kindness he showed me when I was going through a tough time personally (relationship breakdown, divorce), and the opportunities he created for me. It was through his sponsorship I moved into technical product management, took on leading new teams, and was promoted. And to hit it home even harder, he was only a few years older than me.
It made me realise life is too short to fuck around.
In the space of a week I decided that (1) I do want to crack on and do a masters this year, (2) I want to do organisational psychology — something I had been deliberating for the entire last year of my bachelors alongside three others options, and (3) that I was going to do it at Birkbeck, which is much easier to get to but also has a remote study option. So I applied and received an unconditional offer by Wednesday (just like that).
That same day the programme director reached out to me, to advise that the course had already started so I was behind by about a week. I could catch up, but I could also consider deferring to 2026 start.
A part of me dropped; I didn’t want to wait 12 months to start on the next step towards my career goal!
I spoke it over with my partner. He was… ‘concerned’ I think is the word. Rushing into something without thinking it through properly is something I have a habit of doing sometimes. But also, I feel like for the first time in my life I’m in control of what I’m doing in my career — I’m not just saying yes to opportunities as they come up, some of which work out and some of which do not — I’m actually being intentional about what will bring me joy and fulfilment and pay my bills.
I was pissed off.
But as I thought longer about starting the course, the reality of finding time in my schedule to do the reading, the writing, the thinking, I realised that I’m still tired from that ‘last push’ earlier in the year to get my degree over the line. I’d promised myself I would take time out to just breathe and reset. To focus on stabilising and growing my business. There’s always an opportunity cost when we choose one thing over another, and actually it felt like I might be taking too much on, which would mean not giving either my best shot.
So I begrudgingly reached out to admissions and asked to defer for a year.
I also informed the Programme Director who agreed it was a sensible choice. He helpfully shared with me the reading list for the course, and that actually sparked an idea.
I could use this next 12 months as a bridge between BSc and MSc.
I need to keep my skills fresh and active. It’s a ‘use it or lose it’ scenario, and the over-reliance on ChatGPT means I can feel some atrophy in my critical thinking already. But it’s just too easy to ask a LLM what I should say or think or do!
And that is where Big Tech gets you, of course.
So recognising I don’t want to be starting in September 2026 having taken a massive backwards step in my cognitive abilities, I created a study plan to keep using the skills I have spent a long time acquiring. Yes, I did get ChatGPT’s help in creating this plan, mostly to save time in the synthesising of various sources of information. Here’s the steps I / we took (as I think it makes a rather interesting use case, if I say so myself!):
Gather up all the sources of information on the skills I developed in my BSc and will go on to acquire in the MSc. That’s basically the learning outcomes from the course pages.
Ask it to evaluate the long list, and then create a short list of skills to focus on maintaining and improving.
Create SMART goals for practising each of the skills.
Break up the plan into six blocks of 6-weeks (like the structure I had with the OU) where each block has its own study theme and skill cluster.
Have the final block of six be a ‘dissertation’ block where everything is integrated together into one final big piece of work.
Suggest essay titles to practice critical evaluation, one per block utilising the theme, and also linking it to space psychology.
Assign the reading list to each theme / block, and make additional suggestions to round it out (but not too much!); focus on journal articles rather than textbooks or popular books.
Validate the workload — I think I can commit 10 hours each week, so that’s 60 hours per block: can I get through this work realistically in the time allocated?
Together we essentially created a curriculum that will give me a bit of a head start on the Masters itself, and also starts to directly link the theory of organisational psychology to its application within space psychology.
I plan to review and augment this curriculum with additional resources and knowledge from the space psychology short course I’m doing with the School of Disruption (part of the International Space University). But otherwise, I think it’s pretty rounded.
Want to see it?
Of course you do:
I am particularly excited about the dissertation question — it makes me all kinds of academically joyous:
“Women should be the first humans to explore Mars.” Critically evaluate this statement with reference to research on selection, performance, leadership, group dynamics, and well-being in isolated, confined and extreme (ICE) environments.
And of course, I’m going to use my Substack to share the essays, journal article syntheses, case studies, and reflection pieces — and you can follow my Linkedin for the posts I’ll share there too.