<p>There seem to be a lot of people on these forums deciding between studying in the US and studying in the UK, and I thought I'd post my thoughts.</p>
<p>I grew up in the US and did my undergrad there, then went to the UK to do a one year MA in Area Studies (Latin America) at the Institute for the Study of the Americas (part of the University of London).</p>
<p>I enjoyed my MA a great deal and learned a lot. It was perfect for what I wanted, which was just to learn (not for a career), and I had fantastic, supportive professors. And UK universities can be a lot cheaper than private US ones, even after overseas fees. But in many respects you do get you pay for. Coming from a large US private university with a huge research library and seemingly unlimited borrowing rights, in the UK it just seemed like there were fewer books to go around (this may be more a symptom of the fact that I was in a small institute and the University of London is really a conglomerate of various fairly independent institutions who do not allow each other's students to borrow their books). Transcript requests at my US institution take 10 days max to process and you can do it online; at my UK institution during busy periods it may take over a month unless you tell them it's a matter of life or death.</p>
<p>But the facilities/annoying admin issue you can really get over (especially if you go to the British Library-- can't borrow but it's still awesome!) and may certainly be better at larger institution like LSE. The two main things that bugged me were the way that the calendar works and the obsession with exams. I took three courses that each lasted from the beginning of October until end of March (then all of April was for "revising" for exams), exams in May then spent the summer writing the dissertation. Compare that to a US institution where you have courses that run from beginning of September to December and then January to May, without a whole month (in my mind, wasted) on studying for exams. You just get more course time in the US. In many cases in the UK you don’t take different courses each semester; courses are two semesters long, which I feel means that the material gets dragged out too long. I wrote three 10-page papers for each course over the two semesters, which I think ultimately amounts to less coursework per year than I remember doing in the US for my undergraduate degree. Coursework was standardized so that every professor had to assign the same length of essays (and use the same deadline!), which I think is overly rigid.</p>
<p>Exams, for me, felt counter-productive. They seem to think it's the only way they can know for sure you've learned the material, but it seemed funny to me that the way that people studied was NOT by learning the material but by looking at past years' exams and trying to guess which topics they should pre-prepare an essay for. It felt like a game, more than serious studying. And the fact that each course had only one exam, at the end of the year, covering a year’s worth of material, felt needlessly overwhelming to me. I much prefer having midterms and finals spread out across the year the way that it happens in the US – even if the final covers the whole semester, having had the pressure to study for the midterm helps you to be prepared for the final (certainly, if you are more disciplined than I am the UK system won’t bug you quite as much). And finally, for courses in the humanities I find exams a flawed way to assess a student, since such a large part of what you should be learning is to research and write papers, not something you can fully reproduce in an exam – so I think exams should be given less emphasis than the coursework. However, university regulations required that exams count for 2/3 of the overall grade (again, needlessly rigid in my opinion), so even though I got excellent grades on my coursework and an insanely good grade on my dissertation (considering the UK standards), the final grade for my MA did not reflect this because I'm just not good at writing three essays in three hours. Even though I'm not that broken up about the grade itself since it has really had no impact on my life, it felt frustrating to be judged in this way, and I thought I would have learned more from writing more solid research papers (as painful as it can be). </p>
<p>LSE is a fantastic institution. I have sat in on some classes with some professors and there really are some brilliant people there. That said some of my friends doing master's degrees there were disappointed and felt their degree was disorganized (I think this was Development Studies) Personally I felt at my smaller, lesser known institution I was more challenged to write an original piece of research for my dissertation than my friends at LSE.</p>
<p>In part as a result of the above issues, when I decided to pursue a second master’s degree that I wanted, unlike the first one, to further my career, I decided that I would rather make the investment and study at a costlier US institution, despite the fact that I knew I could have had a fine academic experience for much less money in the UK. An added and major factor in my decision was that I ultimately want to work in the US, and you absolutely do lose out in terms of degree recognition and networking in the US, when you get a foreign degree. </p>
<p>So take this as you will (it may not be generalizable across the UK), and I hope it helps anyone who is pondering studying in the UK.</p>