Hi Stephen, thanks for your question! Congrats on your retail banking intern, that's great! 

Understanding that it may make you feel bad about your graduation after the first semester of the year, but it's actually kinda normal. The worst thing of that is just about the inconvenience of potential interviews and assessments that may happen in Sep - Feb, as most of the assessments would happen during these months. 

If you think it's really frustrating, of course having a master degree will add value to your profile, but not really that much in imagination. Having some more internships are much more useful. Also, pursuing one more master degree will just delay your graduation for a year, but won't solve the problem. It may be somehow better for you to just defer; if you do not have any financial concerns, you may want to choose to go for the business master degree. 

Hope the above helps! 

I really feel like answering this question since I'm a final year non business student myself 😂 I'll aim to provide an honest and unfiltered answer and this is purely my opinion.

First, congrats on your offer! It seems that you have a strong interest in entering retail banking or the finance field since you mentioned that you will definitely take the internship offer and would aim to secure a return offer. If that is the case, then you are probably just worried about whether deferring is a good idea. In my opinion deferring is becoming more common nowadays (especially this year) because people want to use that extra time to build up more experience or for other academic reasons like improving their GPA or to go on a full year exchange at a prestigious university. As you are deferring for the opportunity to do a retail banking internship and grasp the chance for a return offer, I think you have a legitimate reason to defer and thus deferring wouldn't look bad on you. I also understand how difficult it is for a non-business student to secure an offer in the finance/commerce field so congrats once again and you should be proud of yourself!

Next, in regard to studying for a business masters degree, 300k is a significant sum of money, but I assume you can afford it. If you were going for a business masters degree at HK, I don't think it's worth it because I would rather pay a little bit more to study for a business masters degree and gain more exposure at a good university outside of HK (I think covid should be less serious by August/September 2021). If you are considering to study at a good university in a foreign country, then studying a business masters degree could be something of consideration along with deferring for the internship offer. 

However, in my opinion I still think you should go for the internship offer and defer instead of studying for a business masters degree because it is relatively difficult to secure this sort of offer as a non business students, and deferring isn't something that looks bad on students nowadays. On the other hand, apart from MBA, as long as you have a decent GPA and can find academic referees, you can easily secure business masters offer anytime even if you are a non business student. Also you won't have to pay the 300k at this moment 😂

To conclude, I think you should go for the internship offer and defer given how difficult it is to secure an bank internship offer for a non business student and given your (implied) strong interest for the field. However if the retail bank is not of a big/prestigious brand, then I think you could strongly consider studying for a business masters degree (preferably outside of HK for that exposure, and also because recruiters seem to like applicants that like come from prestigious US/UK universities). I hope this helps!