In UK you can be associate professor without a degree?
Then you talk about your time "during a master degree" but you say you had not a bachelors... How can you do a master without a bachelors?
Now I understand why other members of academia, even when UK was part of EU, treated it as a special case for research positions. Btw not judging, just saying it is totally different of what I expected.
Yes, in rare occasions! More frequently without say a higher degree. One that springs to mind is the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford University who read classics for their undergrad but with no further education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald
I know there are other examples but I'd need to google a bit to find them. Notable people who got a PhD without a Bachelors or Masters in the US include Wolfram, so it's not just in the UK where rules get a little bent.
> How can you do a master without a bachelors?
Experience in industry counts if its highly related. I was offered or interviewed for postgraduate courses at the University of Leeds, Oxford University, University of Leicester, and a few others. All in Software Engineering and I eventually accepted a part-time position on an MSc in Computer Science. A bit of rigmarole but not that much - I started the course at 25 with 6 years experience in tech. After some pestering I was able to help with some lecturers papers which led to the whole PhD discussion but dropped the MSc because it wasn't as rigorous as I hoped it'd be (I'm interested in the foundations of computer science and this was more applied). If it helps I've been to doctoral summer schools in both the EU and US without any credentials either!
Maybe the UK is the only place with such ways, I emailed Stanford a while back (I'm moving there this Summer, my partners a postdoc, and wanted to try audit some of their postgraduate CS courses) and got shot down pretty quickly!
Plenty of good people go straight into industry after getting their BCs. (or avoid degrees entirely) because of this.
In mine in particular everyone has at least a Master Degree with some publications. One of two even got a PHD.
