On doing two master's degrees at once
Whether reading engineering and economics in parallel is complementary or just tiring.
I am doing an MSc in Disaster Risk Engineering and Management and an MA in Economics at the same time. People ask whether that is sensible. The honest answer is that I do not yet know.
The case for it: engineering tells you whether something can be built and what it will do. Economics tells you whether it should be built and who bears the cost of it being wrong. In my job those two questions arrive together, in the same file, and I have watched decisions go badly because whoever made them was fluent in only one of the two languages.
The case against: neither degree gets my full attention, and depth is what makes a qualification worth anything.
What I have noticed so far is that the overlap is not where I expected. It is not in cost–benefit analysis, which both disciplines teach badly. It is in how each field handles uncertainty. Engineering handles it with factors of safety: absorb the unknown into a margin and design for the margin. Economics handles it with distributions and expected values: price the unknown and let it stay uncertain. Neither is wrong. But a flood protection decision made purely in the first frame overbuilds, and one made purely in the second underbuilds, and I now notice which frame a room is using within about ten minutes.
Ask me again after the second-year exams.