What You Need to Know about Applying to Double Degree Program?
In the University of Vaasa, master students in International Business, Strategic Business Development and Finance have the option to get an international double degree. Basically, it means, that the double degree students will spend their first year of studies in Vaasa and second year abroad in a partner university. Both universities accept the same master’s thesis as part of their degrees. So as a result of two years of studies and one master’s thesis, the students will get two master’s degrees in business. Sounds good, right? Normal master degree in business, in Finland, is two years and now you have the chance to spend one year abroad and earn two master degrees with the same effort as one!
This is what we thought, but to be honest it depends a lot of the receiving university, how much extra work the double degree really demands. In our next blog post, we are going to talk more about the pros and cons of doing the double degree according to our experience. In this post, we are going to focus on the facts that you need to take into account when applying to the program.
Planning your studies
First, you need to plan your studies. It is good to see our university’s International Education Specialist before planning your studies for the first year of master studies. The University of Vaasa demanded us to do all the compulsory courses in the Master’s Degree in International Business, language studies, and courses related to the master’s thesis. All the elective courses were possible to do in the receiving university. Therefore, we needed to fit all of the compulsory courses to our first year of master studies.
Application
The application period for the double degree program is during the Erasmus-application period. When we applied, it was January and the exchange started in September. The application doesn’t differ from a normal Erasmus-application. We needed to write a motivation letter and fill an electric application. You can apply to multiple destinations that our university has double degree program agreements with.
Requirements
Like we mentioned earlier, the double degree demands some planning regarding your studies. You should have done all the compulsory studies in Vaasa before the exchange period. Therefore, it is important that you discuss with our university’s International Education Specialist before application. You can also ask about the selection criteria, which is mostly the same as in the normal exchange application. However, differing from the normal exchange there has been less competition for the double degree program and almost all the eager applicants have been accepted to the program. So, don’t stress the application!
After being accepted
We heard that we were nominated to the double degree program in February. We both were nominated to our primary choice Kedge Business School, Bordeaux campus in France. After the nomination, we needed to do Kedge Business School’s own application, where we needed to provide necessary documents such as ID, study records and language certificate. This certificate could be made by the language teacher. Kedge Business School demanded the language certificate of our level of English as well as the level of French if we wished to do courses also in French.The minimum level required to complete courses is B2.
For Kedge Business School, their own application was rather a formality and we never received an official acceptance email. Therefore, the next steps were to get an apartment and start to plan our stay in France. We will write a separate post about practical information about moving abroad. So stay tuned for more post!
Final words, the application process for the Double Degree Program is very simple and easy, but it needs some extra planning of your studies. To help you to make a decision, our next post will focus on the pros and cons of the Double Degree Program. We will also tell why we decided to apply to the program.
Sini & Mari
Check our Instagram account, where we share more casual content and pictures from our year in Bordeaux: projectdoubledegree