SGTU: Choosing a Course

What you spend most of your time doing at university is up to you, but it’s a fair bet that you’ll be doing some work on your course at some point.

Hopefully.

Most students start out wondering which course they’ll do at university, and then look for a university that does that course, and then, for their choices, put together a compromised group of options based on course, location, predicted grades and so on.

You think you have a reasonably good idea of what course you want to do, and then you start looking at the prospectuses, and it dawns on you that there are one HELL of a lot of courses out there. Oxford Brookes, to pick a name at random does a staggering 83,000 courses (when you take into account that you combine any two subjects), in everything from Fine Art to Acupuncture. Put in the number of universities there are in the country, and you’re looking at a stupidly large number of courses.

It may happen that you’re flicking through a prospectus or the UCAS guide, and you spot something that you quite fancy doing, even though it’s a bit different to your chosen course, or even something totally different.

I say to you at this point, if you have any kind of difficulty with decisions, you are now officially screwed. Getting out of this situation either entails sitting down, panicking briefly, and then spending a lot of quality time reading prospectuses for courses that you might like to do, or you can ignore it and try and forget that you might be making the wrong decision with, as has probably already been pointed out to you by most adults in your life at every opportunity, the rest of your life. There’s enough stress in the average 6th Former’s life without me adding to it, but hey, I’m trying to help. You do your research, you get closer to doing what you want to do, maybe other people will read this and do the same thing, and we’re a couple of people closer to being a happy, well-balanced and content nation. Yes. Of course.

I find decisions get more difficult to make with increasing rest-of-my-life impact, so it took me two years to choose a course. But hey, that’s just me. You might be one of those lucky people who have a burning passion for your chosen course, and can’t wait to get out of sixth form and crack into Medicine, or English, or Acupuncture. Well, good luck to you, but reading this section of the Guide was a bit of a waste of time, don’t you think?

Go on, bugger off, you smug git.

Something else. From talking to a lot of people about their decisions, their UCAS form lists, final decisions and insurance choices and so on, very few people are ever completely sure. With so much choice, there’s always the nagging suspicion that maybe you’re missing something. Don’t panic. If you have a list, and you’re happy with it, you know a fair bit about each university on the list, you’re happy that the courses don’t include compulsory field trips to Outer Mongolia where you spend your entire second year looking at the genitals of yaks (unless you want to), then relax. You’ve done well. If you have some nagging doubts, try and think rationally about them.

Why do you have nagging doubts?

Is it because you think that maybe you thought you’d do psychology purely because more girls do that course and you’re hopeless with women? Did you go for engineering because more blokes do that course and you’re hopeless with women? Are you, being honest with yourself, purely going to university for the sex? Whatever it is, think about it and try and evaluate what you’ve done in terms of why you are worrying. If, at the end of all of that, you still can’t pin down why you feel vaguely guilty or worried about your choices, then stop.

You’re fine.

Do take which university the course is at into consideration. Do nothing until you’ve read ‘Choosing a university’. Do it now. Yes, NOW.

Hand the form in and have done with it.
There.
You feel better now, don’t you?
No?
Well, there’s fuck all you can do about it now, so relax.

You’re off to university.