Graduate school

Aiming for a graduate school course is one good way of continuing - except that, like my friend , I have to be a bit mindful of my age. As I get older, it doesn't stop me enrolling in study courses, but it may limit my employment prospects at the other end of them. If that isn't a problem, of course I should pursue grad school.

I'm very doubtful that I'd be able to claim a scholarship for a master's course in the USA, the UK or any major European country. I'm not informed of details, but they mostly see the Japan/Korea/Taiwan/Singapore (and increasingy, /China) group of countries as one source of income where they can pick up higher fees than they can charge locally. For example, the UK is still in the European Union, and so British universities cannot make higher charges for students coming from countries like Germany or the Netherlands. Instead, they try and recruit from either northeast Asia or from the Gulf Arab countries. My good friend ( age of 63) has affected by this himself, because He took a (second) master's course in English education at the University of Oxford (UK) in the early 1990, when he recalled the years It was mainly a distance course, with some schooling weeks in Japan, but He also took one semester off (making up for all the missed classes in the year before and the year after) to go and spend four months on campus over there. Even though He still had UK citizenship, they charged him their special highest rate because He was resident in Japan and had no home address in Britain. It wasn't very cheap, and there was no offer of financial help from anywhere, he adds. 

For applications, according to him, Oxford had in-country agents in Japan, Korea, etc. in the 1990s, but now they do everything online. It will be very similar to what I found with Sussex and  Johns Hopkins. It's very attractive, but it's nearly all a one-way access system, where they told me what qualifications I need and then ask me to fill out the UK universities' common application procedure and wait for their answer if it comes.

Needless to say, I found it vastly easier to get into one of the graduate schools in Japan I could visit the university and spoke to the professor responsible for admissions that year. So while I'm thinking of overseas courses, I think I may as well at the same time to at least look at what is on offer. 

Either way, I'll try to do what I can. I will just do what I see as most practical, though. 

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