Going to uni to do the thing you want a career in is a good plan.
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Uni places should be competitive, based on ability not "we need more people so we'll drop the required grades".Abolish tuition fees, reduce course places and give students grants to cover living costs accessed on parent income.
I was extremely "lucky" in that I never had to pay fees for my first degree as my mother earnt well under whatever the limit was. I also worked part-time and finished with 2/3 of my student loan still in the bank - which only got spent while I was in VISA limbo in Canada.
I'm definitely for taking a year out before uni to work, it'll do you good even if you hate it.Comment
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Do it before you get bogged down with mortgages, family commitments and kids. By then you'll likely have become more risk averse.Originally posted by charlesr View PostComment
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It's been my thinking for the last 10-15 years, there are too many university places, and not enough genuinely suitable people that should be on them, together with actual meaningful courses. Note I said suitable. Not being suitable doesn't mean you're unskilled or stupid, but university isn't for everyone. There are plenty of other ways to make your way in the world, apprenticeships and manual vocations are equally valid and needed in the world (plumbers, electricians, carpenters etc). Not everyone needs to go to university, and certainly not the aspired goal of 50% set by New Labour.Originally posted by QualityChimp View Post
As Charles also noted, what you learned at university is probably more important than what you studied. I did engineering, and from my (stupidly successful and highly rated) year of peers, around a third went into engineering, a third went into finance, and a third went into IT. When you're that young and starting to find a job, your skill sets of what you can do outside of your course are just as important. Can you write and spell correctly? Can you do basic maths? Can you work with other people successfully? Are you presentable?
Lie with passion and be forever damned...Comment
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^^^ agree with Mayham. And I'll add "Can you form meaningful relationships with people you haven't known since childhood", "Can you manage your time, meet deadlines, achieve goals"Comment
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After finishing my first degree, I came back to Finland, and started driving a cab again. I needed to pay my outstanding debts and got stuck driving for a few years... The started my second bachelor's degree in Engineering and now I'm sitting at the office in my new summer job at a telecommunications company. I'm 30 now so I'm a slow starter but at least I had fun.
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I graduated with a first in CS last year and I just didn't know what I'd wanted to do immediately afterwards. I liked programming but I felt burnt out on it after pushing myself a lot through university, so I drifted for a few months and got really depressed while I was working a weekend job and trying to figure out the next step during the week. I put up with lots of pushy agencies and did an employment trial for a joyless software company in an awful office, which made me feel worse.
In the end I realised that nobody was going to help me except myself, so I worked full-time hours at my part-time job for a couple of months and randomly applied directly for the job I'm doing now. I've been there for just over a month and I'm really enjoying myself- it's a good company, a great team, the work is stimulating and I'm getting a decent salary for a graduate. I get the impression that I'm going to be transitioned from QA into development before long but that'll be fine by me when the time comes.
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Well my degree is in film and it's one profession where having a degree makes no difference. Films are my biggest passion in life which is why I done the course, plus to live abroad a uni degree is a minimum requirement which I learned the hard way when my application to stay in Canada was refused.
At the moment I'm trying to weigh up my different options. One is to move back with my mum , work a ****ty weekend job and during the week days do film related work until I get to the point where I get paid for it. Another option is to take time out and teach in japan for 7 months and save as much cash as I can or I can get a promotion at my current job and work full time in a job I absolutely hateComment
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7 months seems like a very specific length.
Do you have a goal in mind for the future, even if not for the immediate future?Comment
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Glutton for punishment more like!Comment
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The best thing to come out of my degree was meeting my girlfriend (now wife). The second best thing was growing up there. I was a wide-eyed 17 year old going from a small town in the midlands to London. Left a man
I didn't like what I was studying but saw it though knowing I wanted to do something else after I had finished. Spent about 18months looking for a training job after whilst working in my family business. Several years later ............ I am in the City rat race.Comment
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Do you actually want to be a filmmaker? If so, what end of the process? I'm in a related field and the thing is that you are in a very different field to most other careers. What counts is your work and little else but your work and, unless your student work is the most awesome student work ever made, you need to be in a hurry to replace it with even better work. You're in a competitive field but a supportive one, where people will help you out. But you have got to be so self-motivated now. If it's something you really want to do, you have got to do the work, improve asap and then offer to work on anything and everything while you're starting out. The longer you leave it, the harder it will be.
Of course if you don't really want to get into film, disregard all of the above!Comment
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Indeed awesome. I'd love to study that but it means no slacking off if you want to get ahead. Math is awesome, and grueling.Originally posted by Kit View PostComment
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Math is pretty much the single main reason I'm not a mathematician today.Comment
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