I’ve previously written about how I was applying to become a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I am in fact now a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro pursuing a Master’s Degree in Peace & Conflict Studies. I completed my first course on July 20th.
I am overjoyed that in a fairly difficult course I was able to successfully obtain an A, a 97% score.
I got a perfect score on my first paper and on my final paper but I missed a few points on my second paper.
The purpose of this post is to talk about my initial experiences as an online graduate student because it’s very interesting and I actually quite like it despite the reservations many people have about doing graduate school online.
What My First Course Was About:
The course was on what I personally want to specialize in the real world, the intersection of religion and Peace & Conflict. I submitted three papers during the course and each of them talked about unique and distinct conflicts.
My first paper was about the role of moderate Muslims and media when it comes to dealing with Al-Shabaab in Kenya and Somalia, my second paper discussed the possibility of Roman Catholics stepping up and becoming serious peace-builders and a force for justice in Nicaragua, and my final paper which I submitted late Thursday night was about how the United States could and should act to empower moderate Muslims in Xinjiang, China to combat the influence of Islamic extremists upon the Uighur nationalist movement and to begin to walk towards peace between the Uighurs and the Han in that part of China and beyond while also acknowledging the need for serious change from the Chinese government in terms of how they’ve treated both Xinjiang and the Uighurs themselves.
I have begun a blog exclusively dedicated to Peace and Conflict Studies and on that blog, I’ll be posting each of the papers I wrote since I actually really liked each of them. I adored this course and it gave me exactly what I wanted from graduate school: real feedback about my writing style and guidance towards how to become a better scholar of Peace and Conflict Studies.
What It Seems To Take To Succeed In Online Graduate School:
I’ll be doing reflections like this every semester and I’ll be including a section just like this one in each of those posts. Some things to consider when reading this particular post: I just took a summer course which lasted 5 weeks.
Those types of courses are in a sense really brutal because everything happens really quickly.
This wasn’t my first summer course but it was my first graduate school course and my first summer graduate course which was really useful for two reasons: it demonstrated to me if no one else that I actually have what it takes to succeed in this program, and it showed me that I can handle even high intensity and high-speed courses. Other people told me I could and my university obviously believed in me but that doesn’t mean I was as sure as they were.
This course ended up giving me a lot of confidence in that regard.
In my opinion, to succeed in online graduate school, you have to be a self-starter. If you have a tough time motivating yourself without the usual pressures of going to a classroom and sitting in front of a professor and having exams, you’re going to have a really hard time in an online graduate school course. Also, it’s worth noting that even if online graduate school sounds super chill and relaxing to you because you think there’ll be no meetings or no exams, there are professors and courses who give typical exams and have regular sessions of class just through the internet.
My course was a paper and participation course with no regularly scheduled meetings or exams but that is not always the case and I’ve taken other online classes as an undergraduate student where we did have meetings scheduled in advance that were mandatory and where we took typical exams instead of relying on papers to assess our understanding of the material.
You need to have excellent time management skills to succeed in online graduate school as well. My course’s final assignment was a 10-15 page paper which as someone who studied history as an undergraduate is not a big deal, but the course lasted 5-6 weeks and there were 2 other assignments before that that were 5-7 pages long each.
This adds up quickly and it’s easy for someone who lacks time management skills to lose track of when what is due and not succeed in an assignment like this due to that.
The next post I do like this will be a lot longer than this one because I’m taking 3 courses in the Fall. I look forward to taking them and hopefully doing even better in them than I did in this course. I’d love to respond to questions in the comment section and to have a neat conversation about online graduate school with anyone who wants to know more about my experience thus far! If you want to hear more from me in general or about Peace & Conflict Studies specifically check out the aforementioned blog and come on down to my Discord! I’d love to chat with you about anything you feel like discussing.