Whether you are a Psychology student forced to code for hours each week, a Social Anthropology student who (like rest of us) still does not understand what it really is, or a French and Politics student with your Parisian year-abroad dreams broken at the pernickety politics requirements, your degree that you applied for at about 17 years old may not be teaching you or preparing you for your future as expected.
University websites clearly show our compulsory modules and the available electives for your degree, not to mention those same repetitive disclaimers on our open-days. My Psychology cohort was told crystal clear many times that we would be required to code a lot, but still we are horrified by our DAPR labs each week. Perhaps you downplayed the extent of the workload on Engineering or Medicine or overlooked a couple of the niche compulsory modules on ‘Interdisciplinary Futures’ or ‘Business with Enterprise and Innovation’, many students ignore these open-day disclaimers about their courses, assuming them to be minor additions to their idealistic predictions of what their course will entail.
Personally, I was excited to have so much freedom on the electives I chose at Edinburgh vs the more strict timetables at many English universities, this came to bite me in the back when signing up for electives in the summer, and realised there were not many relevant or interesting Psychology related courses. Since I (as like many social science students) did not want to opt for a niche course where I would be lucky to have more than 10 other students in each lecture, I instead took on the toll of taking Core Philosophy (MML) and Foundation Spanish. Both electives have absorbed most of my time on the 4th Floor and my assignments and lectures feel irrelevant to my hopes of clinical psychology.
This Christmas included year abroad anticipations or internship applications for most of my peers, and now many of us have started to realise that perhaps these 4 years at university could have been better spent. As many likely agree, spring weeks or internships arguably matter more than our degrees themselves. Many of us have a friend back home who went straight into work after school and now seems to always be getting a promotion. Therefore as my younger sisters now consider their post A-Level options, I hope they properly consider the possibility of apprenticeships so they can learn relevant material and get more employable experience.
However, university offers so much more for our young adult lives than careers ever could, with many unique society opportunities on offer: from RAGs charity ‘Race to Prague’ to Psych-Eds mental health teaching in schools, from writing forThe Student, to getting funding to teach across the world. The University of Edinburgh has so much more freedom and opportunity to build our soft-skills, hobbies and unforgettable memories. Our degree misjudgements should not be regrets, rather fuel to embrace everything that university has to offer whilst still unburdened by the anchors of adulthood and a 9-5.
Photo by Spencer Siles Giavalisco for The Student.