Should you not apply to a MA program that....?

Question

Should you not apply to a program that does not have any Full-time faculty who have research interests in the area you want to write your thesis on? Because there's a really great school I want to apply to but I read all the faculty bio's and not a single person has the same research interest as me, or even a somewhat similar research interest.
I'm finding that I'm running into this problem with a lot of the grad schools I have been researching and the majority of them are well-known ones. What should I do

Answer 1

It depends on what you want to do with your degree. If you want to eventually get a PhD and become a professor, I recommend applying to at least a few of the best schools in your field for a couple of reasons: 1) your research interests will probably change once you start graduate studies, and 2) tenure-track jobs in academia are not abundant. Generally speaking, people with PhDs from top schools tend to do better on the academic job market than those from second-tier schools. (There are exceptions, though.) Furthermore, PhD programs also tend to accept applicants with M.A.s from their own school over outside applicants, and it's usually more difficult to get accepted into a PhD program than an M.A. So if becoming a professor is your ultimate goal, I recommend applying to some of the top schools and some of the schools that best suit your current interests. When you find out which schools have accepted you, that's when it's time to make the final decision by contacting the schools to find out more information about their program, specific professors, and job placement rates and, if possible, to be given access to current grad students at the institution to ask their opinions about the program.

Hope this helps some. Best of luck!

Answer 2

First of all, you shouldn't yet know what you want to write your thesis on; the thesis is a culmination of your degree program, and you should discover your interest while you are in the program (you remind me of a former student whom the faculty made fun of in my doctoral program; every paper he wrote was on the same subject matter, something he was obsessed with before he came into the program). Secondly, you may not have a good sense of what constitutes a good research problem yet and may not be thinking in the right terms. I know that when I talk to students in our master's program, they frequently are hung up on studying a particular industry, rather than coming up with a proper research question, and it takes quite a bit of effort to get them off that focus. You might want to talk to a faculty member at the school you are thinking of, to judge whether or not what you have in mind learning and what they have in mind teaching can work together. It may just be a matter of semantics, and you wouldn't want to miss out on an opportunity because you misinterpreted the bios. Call the program office and ask if you can speak with a faculty member. Most of us are more than happy to do this for potential students.

Answer 3

Find one that does have a professor with your research interests.