WARNING: Don’t quit your job or business to travel abroad for studies!
Before you make up your mind to travel abroad to study as a Nigerian, please read the tips below:
1. If your choice of field or course of study is Accounting, Business Administration, Marketing, etc, please don’t be quick to travel abroad to study because those courses are well-tutored here, and mostly based on Nigerian business environment. Most of the facilities for tutoring those courses are here in Nigeria, so consider Nigerian universities than going abroad to waste a whole lot of money only to come back with same probability of securing a job like those who studied here in Nigeria
2. If your choice of course is Engineering, foreign universities will be a better option because most Nigerian universities don’t have the necessary facilities to ground students in this field. Now, if you want to study Mechanical Engineering, consider United States of America (MIT, etc), India, and maybe UK.
3. If you want to study Chemical Engineering, and such related courses, consider Russia and United States as your best destination
4. If you want to study Medicine, United States, India and Canada is your best choice
5. If you want to study computer science, look no further than United States and India. If you want to be grounded in programming and all those stuffs, head to India.
6. If you want to study Law, Literature, etc, UK and United States should be your choice destinations.
7. If you want to stand higher chances of securing a job after graduating from a foreign university, then you must be an engineering student (mechanical, electrical, etc, from United States, India, etc).But if you studied Administrative courses, then save up money and enroll at Lagos Business School, otherwise known as PAN-AFRICAN University in Lagos Nigeria. If you can get an MBA from there (cost around 3.5 – 4million naira), you will stand better chances of securing a job in Nigeria.
There is something you need to know before deciding to travel abroad to study. First, you must find out if there are no local Nigerian universities offering your course of choice, and if they are offering it, find out if they have a proven good record in that course- are there graduates employed in good places? How are their performances after graduation? Do employers value their graduates? If your findings says yes, then why going abroad to waste resources.
For instance, Nigerian higher institutions don’t have good facilities to train graduates in Mechanical engineering, petroleum engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, biomedical technology, etc, so it wouldn’t be a bad choice for you to make the decision to travel abroad to further your engineering knowledge or education.
How can you travel abroad to study marketing? Our marketing environment here in Nigeria is quite different from the western own, so it may not be so easy for you to succeed here when you graduate from there, and employers will unlikely give you a preferential consideration as someone who studied abroad because they know that there is no difference between you and those who studied marketing in a Nigerian higher institution.
Again, before making a decision to travel abroad to study, have it in mind that you are not going there to acquire certificate and come back to be rushed after by employers. Have it in mind that you are going there to expand your practical knowledge in your chosen course, and to enrich your knowledge to be able to apply the knowledge to establish your own company if employers fail to hire you within the first two three years of returning back to Nigeria.
Lastly, don’t use your last card or last penny to further studies abroad, it is more advisable to even use half of it to acquire a higher certificate from a reputable Nigerian institution and then invest the remaining one in a viable business that you can be running while furthering your studies.
And if you want to study computer science abroad, make sure you are going there to learn truly and not just to bag certificate to stand greater chance of being employed in big firms here in Nigeria because you may not succeed, why? Employers that employ computer scientists look for their practical knowledge, how they can use programming and all of that to debug their company problems and bring more solutions, and not just to have you for nothing. Remember, we have few successful dotcom companies here in Nigeria that can pay you huge salary, so have it in mind that you will either be working independently or as a contract staff, and your success will be highly determined by your high level programming expertise and not your class or kind of certificate or degree. India and United States seem to be a good destination for computer scientists and aspiring tech-developers. Good luck, and please look well before you leap to avoid later regrets.
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