Expert: Daniel Mazur - 9/5/2006

Question
Thank you very much for the answer to my last question, I am very pleased that you want to know much about my qualification, this shows that i can realy get help. As at now I am working as laboratory technologist in one of the etex group companies in Nigeria.  I calibrate,and ensure that  the equipments for quality control measurement are properly maintained.My qualification as  higher national diploma is an equivalent to  first degree in Nigeria and it is awarded by only the polytechnics, while degree is awarded by universities only. -------------------------
If you know better place for me in UNITED STATES AS WELL i wouldn't mind.
Thanks sir.
Followup To

Question -
Iam 31years old, i have higher national diploma in physics with electronis in one of the polytechnis in Nigeria, I would like to further online in any of the universities in UK can you please link me up with one?

Answer -
Hello,

as I am located in USA, I know little about UK colleges. Just recently I heard the Nottingham University is pretty decent and famous for its Physics, so You might try there.

I am not familiar with how a diploma on Nigerian polytechnics compares to the UK education system, and I could not understand from your question either, if you are more interested in physics or in electronics, what you are doing for living now and what you would like to do after the UK college. Please forgive me for not being able to help more. If you post a follow-up with details of the career you'd like to follow, I will be glad to assist.

Good luck!
Daniel

Answer
Hello,

I apologize for delaying my answer. A lot has been going on in my work for past week...

I have a much better picture of your education level and work you do now, although it's still difficult to say how well Nigerian and English (or U.S.) degree systems match. As an undergrad I worked in a semiconductor plant in my home country in central Europe for a Summer job, as an operator of output control, and I worked with technologists, who did pretty much what you describe. I made good friends with one of them.

This allows me to say that you have a decent chance to enhance your education abroad. Your choice of foreign school will be affected by more than we discussed so far, though. A person, who can afford it, can travel anywhere and study anywhere and such a person would only need to consider fame of the schools and how much they ask on tuition. A person with limited resources, who'd just about manage to save up for an air ticket (this was my case when coming to the U.S.) needs to be less picky about the school and rather consider, how much it would cost to study at one school or another and (VERY IMPORTANTLY) if either of the schools offer financial aid to such students. Let me make a summary of what you need to find out about ANY school you'd seriously consider:

1) How does the school regard your diploma? Will they allow you into Graduate level at all? If YES, at what conditions? In USA this is usually the TOEFL and GRE tests that you pass with a sufficient score. Undergraduate applicants must have passed TOEFL and SAT/SAT II or similar test. Graduate programs are generally better, if you have limited resources, because Graduate students are alloved to work in Teaching Assistant(TA) and Research Assistant(RA) positions at the universities themselves, thus having a reasonable income from the beginning. And they fail to accept your diploma as a full B.A. degree, will they let you in with a TA or RA allowance? OR, will they have a financial aid ready that will sustain you, if you have to redo the B.A. level?

2) Whether you get accepted as an udergraduate or graduate, you'll want to know, if any of the classes you took at your polytechnics can be approved as an equivalent to a mandatory class at your target university. The more courses you get approved, the better. It will save you time (you can get to your new degree faster) and money (on tuition). At this stage you also need to learn, how difficult it is to get visa to study in either of the countries. Another technicality is, if you have a chance to do the required examinations in your home country, or you have to travel abroad for them too, or the school lets you do the tests AFTER you start your first semester there.

3) Only after you have researched the above, communicated with a number of universities offering physics and/or electronics programs, and selected a few that you can afford or that will grant you the best start-up ranks, you need to sit down and dig deeper in their internet sites at the pages of their departments and staff. This way you'll find, how well each and every department is connected to industry (i.e. famous employers such as Intel, Microsoft,...) and cutting-edge research. The latter is hard to judge, but if you have a feel on what you'd like to do after graduation, you can evaluate the "match" between you and the university quite well.

That's it. As you can see, it is not so much a question of how good each school is. If you have trouble judging the quality, look at the name first. If it is named after a city and the city is reasonably famous, the school is almost 100% a reasonably good one. In the U.S., you can add most Institutes of technology named after states they reside in: Massachussetts (MIT), California (CalTech), Illinois (IIT, my school now). The more famous (and expensive schools) in US are located along the East and West coast, the cheaper and less famous ones (sorry folks...) are in the middle of the continent. Chicago (Illinois) is half way in between, similar as Texas. In UK you are down to several colleges in London with names like Royal or Imperial, and then large cities like Hull, Nottingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Exeter... all these places are reasonably famous and have their history and past successes.

I wish you patience in your information search and evaluation and good luck in the application process, wherever you might decide to go.

Cheers!
Daniel