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Demand for places on master’s in management courses is soaring, as students fresh out of uni are realising the qualification is their golden ticket to highly sought-after graduate positions at companies like Goldman Sachs or PwC. After all, it’s hardly a coincidence that 95% of grads from London Business School’s Masters in Management accept a role within three months of graduation, earning a mean salary of £41,963 (US$55,408).

We asked the experts at LBS to tell us some of the amazing career benefits from graduating with a prestigious master’s in management degree.

1. You’ll avoid the nightmare of that soul-wrenching first job

The general consensus among professionals and recruiters is that grads have to pay their dues before they get a well-paid and fulfilling job, but nothing could be further from the truth. All of the students on LBS’s MiM have less than two years of prior relevant experience, and a large majority of them move into the consulting, finance and technology sectors straight out of uni, jumping the queue and claiming those top jobs.

2. You’ll probably end up working abroad as a consultant in investment banking or financial services

42% of students who graduated from LBS’s MiM in 2016 moved into consulting, 34% found jobs in finance - including investment banking, private equity and venture capital, investment management and financial services - while the rest diversified and chose to work in areas such as technology, media and entertainment.

Bart van der Veld graduated from LBS with a MiM in 2016 and is now working as an associate consultant at Bain & Company Amsterdam. In an interview, he explained he owes part of his success to LBS’s amazing careers team. He said: “Their support in preparing me for the career management journey allowed me to achieve my ambition of a role in consulting”.

3. Your payslips will always be impressive

With a mean base salary of £41,963 and the average bonuses being £7,648, LBS’s MiM students are earning almost twice as much as the typical starting graduate salary. Professionals with a MiM can expect a much higher earning potential than colleagues without a similar qualification.

4. You’ll have an impressive lineup of transferrable skills

Leadership and problem-solving might sound like LinkedIn buzzwords, but both are important skills that could get you hired in most industries, especially if you’re hoping to manage teams or clients on a daily basis. If you decide later in life to change careers, having a few transferrable skills will make the transition a lot smoother.

5. You could land a top job at the likes of Google, Goldman Sachs, or J.P. Morgan

Receiving your training from the right place makes all the difference. At LBS, for instance, you’d be invited to student-led conferences to meet and debate with industry pioneers, entrepreneurs, policymakers and government leaders, which should put you in a really good position for your job hunt. Companies that have hired from LBS’s MiM in the past include HSBC, Accenture, Amazon, Ernst and Young, J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse, Google, Thomson Reuters, Goldman Sachs and many more…

Looking for some inspiration this summer? We’ve rounded up some of the most interesting recent articles on developments in artificial intelligence, from Elon Musk’s plans to connect our minds to the cloud, to A.I. that’s capable of building its own robots. The future is coming, here’s what to expect...

Rise of the robots

Last week, a computer program beat the world’s strongest Go player. The Chinese board game was one of the last cerebral games in which humans still retained the upper hand over robots, and the world’s best Go player, Ke Ji described the experience of taking on Google’s “godlike” machine as “horrible”.

Naturally, it begs the question: how long until robots takeover or are granted the same rights as humans? Probably sooner than you might expect, actually. Under a new draft plan by the Europe Union, A.I. could be classed as “electronic persons”, with their owners liable for social security.

A black and white issue

Aside from putting us out of work and suppressing humanity, there’s also growing concern that algorithms might be… racist. A black researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that a social robot recognized her face with more accuracy when she was wearing a white mask. Joy Buolamwin breaks it down for us noobs on the Guardian about her experiences of dealing with racial bias in robotics.

Of course, Joy isn’t the only person who’s been at the receiving end of nasty bigoted robots. Last year, a beauty contest judged by A.I. sparked a backlash, after only one of the 44 contestants was black. And let’s not forget Microsoft’s chatboy Tay, designed to interact with youths on Twitter, who went rogue into Twitter egg mode.

Immortality beckons

Hungry for more creepy tech content? Discover transhumanism: the creepy philosophy espoused by the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The American writer Meghan O'Gieblyn, a former Evangelical Christian, fell into transhumanism after a bartender lent her a copy of The Singularity is Near by Raymond Kurzweil. Read about her fascinating experiences in the Guardian - or listen to the podcast.

Uploading our brains into the cloud…

Creeped out yet? You’re not alone. Elon Musk reckons A.I. will surpass human brainpower “by a lot” unless we connect our minds to the cloud. After dropping hints all year long, Elon Musk finally confirmed rumours that he was working on a technology called Neural Lace, a brain implant designed to create super-intelligence in humans and connect our brains to computers. Read about Elon Musk’s new brain-machine interface startup, Neuralink here.

If you’re interested in the ethical ramifications of the singularity (the point in time when humans and machines will converge), you should check out National Geographic’s new docu-drama on the subject, Year Million. A sober Black Mirror, the futuristic series gives us a frightening glimpse into our future, with many of the technologies featured in the show already in the works.

For more info on the docu-drama Year Million and robot rights, check out Inverse’s great article on the Nat Geo series’ basis in reality and Gizmodo’s fresh and original take on why robots are so creepy.

A.I. inception

In May, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the company’s new pet project: AutoML, an artificial intelligence capable of building its own robots. Yes, you read that right. Joking that his team had achieved “A.I. inception”, Pichai explained AutoML has the potential to improve speech recognition, tech facial recognition software and dramatic advancements in finance, agriculture and healthcare. Explore AutoML here.

This year, the QS World University Rankings® are published on June 8. Over 950 universities from 84 different countries will be ranked, based upon their reputation among over 75,000 academics and more than 40,000 employers, as well as their faculty to student radio, the number of citations per faculty and how international their faculty and students are. (For a full breakdown of the methodology click here).

Since last year, a series of seismic political changes around the world have had a major impact on higher education, so it will be interesting to see what effect this has on the 2018 ranking. Here are some of the things to look out for.

The Trump effect

Rewind the clock twelve months and few people would believe that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States. It seemed even less likely after a string of scandals in the run-up to election day, which peaked when a now-infamous tape leaked in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. However, here we are and the impact of a Trump presidency on the appeal of the US to international students is likely to be significant.

Although the Trump administration has so far failed at convincing the courts to let an attempted travel ban stand on citizens from six Muslim-majority countries, the uncertainty is likely to make the US a less attractive destination. Coupled with a lack of clarity about how Trump’s presidency will impact funding for higher education, this could affect US universities in this year’s ranking. Could MIT slip from their position as the world’s best university, a title they’ve held for the last five years? We’ll have to wait and see.

Brexit means Brexit

Across the Atlantic, the UK is dealing with its own image crisis, as Brexit and a surge in anti-immigration sentiment threatens to impact the ability of British universities to attract top international students. As Brexit negotiations are yet to begin (and there’s also the small matter of a general election to get through first), it may be too early for Brexit to have had a severely damaging impact on British universities, but the warning signs are there. No wonder prominent British universities are stepping up plans for campuses based abroad.

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A changing Europe

What effect will France’s new President Emmanuel Macron have on his country’s universities? Paris lost ground to Montreal in the QS Best Student Cities 2017 ranking, but whether this means similarly bad news for French universities remains to be seen. Elsewhere, Germany has long been a popular destination for international students, particularly because tuition fees were abolished in 2014 at all public universities. This may not last forever though, and the south-west state of Baden-Württemberg will be reintroducing tuition fees for non-EU students, starting from this autumn. Will German universities remain a popular destination if more states follow suit?

Internationalization on the rise

As technology and investment helps the world get smaller every year, the gap between the biggest and smallest countries in the world narrows. While there was once a time where the best universities in the world only came from a handle of countries, large-scale investment in the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and elsewhere in the world has levelled the playing field somewhat. This was true in last year’s World University Rankings and is likely to be the case again this year, so keep an eye out for universities that have made impressive gains on their position last year. There’s likely to be more than a few.

Explore this year’s QS World University Rankings in full when they go live at 00:01 BST on June 8.