“Before I applied to Exeter, a lot of people told me not to bother. The common advice in Vietnam was that marketing is a practical field and what matters is experience, not another degree…So instead of going straight into a master’s after graduating, I spent a year working full time as a campaign marketer at Garena, one of the largest gaming companies in Southeast Asia. I also ran my own small online business on the side, handling everything from market research to social media to performance tracking.
That year taught me a lot. But it also showed me something I had not expected. Every senior marketer and team lead I worked with had either studied abroad or held a master’s degree, and most of those master’s were from UK universities. The difference was not just that they knew more. It was how they thought. They approached problems more systematically, communicated more precisely, and seemed to operate with a kind of analytical confidence that I could not quite replicate by reading the same articles or taking the same online courses.
I started to realise that what a good master’s gives you is not just knowledge. It is a way of thinking, a way of working, and a level of academic and professional fluency that a domestic degree and a few years of local work experience had not given me. That is what made me decide to pursue a UK master’s, and specifically one with a strong emphasis on data and strategy.
My journey to Exeter was not a straight line. I had originally planned to start in September, but my family faced some unexpected challenges…What I did not know at the time was how fortunate that would turn out to be. Exeter offers a January intake, which is genuinely rare among top UK universities, and it meant I did not have to lose an entire year. That flexibility felt like the university understanding that life does not always go to plan.
Beyond that, Exeter’s triple accreditation (AMBA, AACSB, and EQUIS) and its consistent ranking among the top five UK universities for marketing made it the clear choice for me. I was drawn especially to the programme’s emphasis on data-driven marketing and research-led teaching, both of which aligned with the kind of analyst I wanted to become.
The programme has pushed me to think differently about strategy. I have learned that knowing a framework is only the beginning. The real question is understanding its limits, and whether you are applying it at the right level in the first place. Working through case studies on companies like IHCL, Shiseido, and Whitbread alongside classmates from all over the world has sharpened that instinct in a way I did not expect…Improvement is something I am genuinely proud of, and it would not have happened without the quality of teaching support here.”
