Distinction, whoop!

Friday afternoon I received the excellent news that for my Master’s I achieved a distinction classification. It was quite a solid distinction too, achieving module results of 68, 71, 71, 74, 75. I completed a Master’s in European Business at Royal Holloway. Probably the module I was most pleased with was my dissertation.

I spent all my summer  working on my dissertation, and for the first time it felt like effort correlated with grade. I wrote 15,000  words on the video game industry. One of the biggest changes in the industry is casual gaming. Nintendo have had great success with extending the market with targeting casual gamers, but what interested me was how Microsoft and Sony are going to juggle targeting both the traditional serious gamer and casual gamer.

I collected primary data and did some market research into the purchasing habits of casual and serious gamers. I made a survey available to both segments of the market, and then queried the results and did data analysis. I made some really interesting results too. Obviously those at Royal Holloway agreed since I was awarded 74.  One of the jobs I applied for in the summer after finishing my Master’s was with Nintendo in Frankfurt. The job required a Master’s degree too, so I thought I’d be a good candidate especially considering that I ran one of the largest Nintendo communities on the Internet. Didn’t get a reply though!

Another unit I did well in was quantitative research methods. Starting the unit, I hadn’t done A level maths and only managed a B at GCSE, so m maths skills were severely lacking. Many in the class had already studied statistics as part of their undergraduate programmes and accordingly I was far behind when starting the module. I can visibly remember spending many, many hours in the library reading statistics books so it’s nice that hard work paid off!

Ah, so pleased