How to Choose the Right Part-Time Master Degree

This guest article on how to choose a part-time master degree was originally written by our alumni Dennis Vetterling and Till Rösnick in 2021 and was updated by our Program Consultant Julia Banitz in 2024.

Whether paying for less sleep is a good idea

We both studied the part-time Master in Management program from 2018 to 2020. Based on our experiences, we have developed a set of questions that, in retrospect, would have helped us to understand how to choose a part-time master’s degree and more generally helped us answer the question: Is a part-time master the right choice for us? The original article introducing our 3-step framework can be found on Medium.com. Below we have included the graphic overview of the framework.

In the following article, we are happy to share what we have learned during our time at HHL. We hope our framework helps you make an informed decision based on your personal preference and life goals.

1) What drives your decision to study part-time?

The first thing you should ask yourself is: What is the purpose of studying a part-time master’s program? To determine this, we’ve found the following three categories to be very helpful: Door-opening power of the degree you’re aiming at, the program’s financial requirements, and your willingness to challenge yourself.

2) Do you feel okay spending a significant share of your spare time studying?

One of the most common worries about studying while working full-time is probably the fear that you’ll spend most of the time you’re awake working or studying. Does this sound terrible and like it might conflict with your current goals for your private life (e.g. team sports, travelling etc.)? Even if your first reaction is “Yes!!!”, we’d like to encourage you to dive a bit deeper into this before closing this article and burning your part-time brochure.

Our framework contains three action steps to help you find the right part-time master degree:

1. Sketch a broad time schedule
2. Consult your personal environment
3. Talk to the program’s alumni

In this article, we focus on step one. To be able to sketch a time schedule, you’ll need to know how much time studying part-time will actually take. We have therefore broken down our workload. We hope this helps you to create a broad timeline for yourself.

3) How can your job contribute to your development during your part-time program?

In our original framework, we propose three categories to answer this question: Time expenditure & flexibility, Learning leverage potential, and Future job requirements. As the last category might differ significantly with regards to your individual circumstances we are going to focus on the first two. If you want to dive deeper into the third category, feel free to use our framework found in our long-form article on Medium.

So all in all, we did learn a lot—not only with regards to business knowledge but also about ourselves. We learned how to meaningfully prioritize and solve problems in an effective and efficient way. For both of us, the combination of learning something new, challenging ourselves and using newly gained knowledge in practice has been the perfect blend. We further developed a deep-rooted network of fellow students we not only call “contacts” but many of whom we are honored to call “friends”. We hope this helps to how to choose HHL for youre part-time master degree.

HHL Spirit empowers you to lead responsibly

If you ever hear about the mysterious “HHL Spirit”, well, being allowed to grow beyond your own borders, getting empowered to be an effective, responsible business leader and spending time with people who help you to develop, not because they have to, but they want to—that’s what we feel is HHL Spirit.