Considering courses
How do you choose the right course for you? Rule 1: do what you enjoy and you'll enjoy what you do.
If you already have your heart set on a career, then you can work backwards. What’s going to help you job-wise?
You may need to limit yourself to certain courses. For instance, for medicine, dentistry and various other professions, there are certain bits of paper you have to be able to frame on your wall.
But that’s not true for every career. Even lawyers and teachers — who also require specific qualifications — can start off with more general degrees and then take postgraduate conversion courses.
In many cases, it doesn’t actually take any longer. For example, most Bachelor of Education courses (which qualify you to be a teacher) take four years — but in the same time you could spend three years studying whatever undergraduate degree grabs your fancy followed by a year doing a PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education). You end up just as well qualified and, at the moment, most PGCE students can get more funding.
However, if you’re only sure of the general direction you want your career to take, don’t sweat it — just keep your options open. Most graduate jobs need nothing more than a degree in something vaguely appropriate. But that still means thinking about what course might be vaguely appropriate so that when the crunch comes you’ve got the credentials.
For journalism, say, you might want to think about politics or English. For conservation work, you’d be better off with something like geography, biology, or ecology. But for a job in business, you could pick almost anything: accountancy, languages, business studies, marketing, computing, economics.
A word of warning: some courses that may seem career-specific don’t necessarily help. The classic example is media studies. Push isn’t dismissing all media studies courses — some are great, particularly if they focus on the technical aspects of the industry — but if you want to work in TV, for instance, a non-‘media’ degree could actually help you stand out from the crowd more. If the BBC’s making a programme about the mating rituals of wombats, for example, they’re more likely to give a break to someone who studied zoology and worked on their student TV station than to someone who spent three years doing Marxist analyses of Eastenders plotlines.
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Last updated on: 10 November 2008