What do you want from university?
Ultimately, your choice of course depends on what you want from your university. Here’s a quick guide
You want to get a good job: Try to be specific about what kind of good job you want. Then do a course that’s, at best, a direct qualification, or at least, vaguely appropriate.
You might want to consider ‘vocational’ courses. These are any courses designed to teach you a particular career — although not only do they not necessarily guarantee you a job, they may not even help you get one. For more information about employment rates, click here..
Vocational courses — particularly the best ones — usually involve some kind of link with the relevant industry. Sometimes they’re even ‘sandwich courses’ — which means you spend some time actually working for a company (and, yes, you do get paid). There are thick sandwiches and thin sandwiches, depending on the amount of time you spend working. (There are probably club sandwich courses somewhere too, but Push suspects they’re part of a catering degree.)
Some universities, particularly the ones that used to be polytechnics, specialise in vocational courses. Many of them have excellent relations with businesses and employers and their graduates get jobs easily. Others don’t .
Sometimes, if you want to get a good job, it doesn’t matter what course you do, so long as you’re at a university with a good reputation.
You want to fill time, improve your CV, and keep your options open: Just study whatever shakes your tree. You’ll get better grades and enjoy it more.
You want to study for the sheer thrill of academic endeavour: Again, follow your fancy. You’re clearly already committed (or perhaps should have already been committed to an asylum).
You want to have a good time: There’s no such thing as a ‘doss’ course at university. If you want to do well, you pretty much have to put in the hours whatever the subject.
Having said that, there are some subjects where the course is rigidly structured — lectures and the like from nine to five, plus lots of work at weekends — and there are others where you get to manage your own time a bit more. Traditionally, it’s the sciences where your daily schedule is wall-to-wall, and it’s arts students who earn the reputation for lying in bed all day. Many arts students, however, work just as hard — it’s simply that they have huge reading lists and are often left to get on with it.
To have a good time, the same rule always applies: pick a course you’re going to enjoy, then grab the other opportunities that student life chucks at you.
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Last updated on: 24 April 2008