Msc verses Bsc SLT

Saw this and saw you'd had no responses. For disclosure - I did the BSc route but I work with colleagues now (we all qualified about this point last year) who did the MSc route (mainly MMedSci at Sheffield). I looked into it (I already had a first degree and would have loved a masters) but the course structure and mainly the placement timings didn't work for me, and with hindsight, since we were at the end of our first year when the pandemic hit - I'd never have coped with juggling having my own kids at home during school closures with the way the masters I was looking at had their course organised.

As I understood the specific course I was looking at - a lot of the content needing to be covered is set down by the fact that the course needs to meet the content requirements for HCPC registration at the end of it - so you have a LOT of very similar content but for the Masters it has to be delivered in a shorter duration. This can mean that the teaching terms are longer - I ended up at DMU doing their BSc and DMU basically don't do much teaching at all in the final semester of term - it's exams, assessments and some placement bits to be tied up. I think that the masters courses go much further up to the end of the university actual year in their teaching - and then their placements tend to go over into the school summer holiday period (we still have students starting placements at the moment at work whereas my big "final" placement ran from about Jan - March as I recall it). More of a factor if you have kids of your own or other ties on your time, or are living in uni accommodation and might need to stay there longer than the academic year "norm".

I found that when the pandemic hit I was bloody grateful for the slower pace on the BSc - but I have kids of my own, did not cope well with the whole pandemic experience, and the way our course placement timings worked out meant we'd done the bulk of our placements by the time the lockdowns hit, so we had less lost ground to make up over time.

If it's a new course in general I'd be wanting to know the staffing is in place, that they have placement providers lined up for students and the like - thinking around the area I work in - we've traditionally taken students from two universities, but another uni is starting SLT courses and I don't think we're taking those students yet, purely because they've not put in place the training dates for us to begin taking those students, and obviously we have to release staff to go on that training and jiggle things around (and we usually have to do refreshers on the training every few years). Plus the unis we've traditionally taken from have already submitted their requests to "dibs" a set number of placement slots as well. Add in the SLT apprenticeships which are another area we're taking students in from and I'd just be asking questions making sure that they're going to be able to give the placements they need (just my experience as a recent student and now a B5, soon to be B6 - I got a development post so I'm moving up the bandings a bit quicker than the norm - clinician).

Also it's ALWAYS worth asking for the geographical distance they're expecting you to travel for placements - spoiler - the placement travel area is usually horrifying when you realise just how far you can be expected to go! They do usually try to meet people's needs in terms of if they've got transport or specific requirements but generally we got one that was a bit of a stinker to travel to and one that was a bit easier.