Sydney Life

Finding the right degree is certainly an important decision. Here’s a few things to keep in mind.

For those of you out there trying to choose your uni degrees, let me just say I don’t envy you a bit. Sometimes, the number of choices we have feels like a curse. Mind you, this is coming from a person who - on a bad day - can break down at the prospect of choosing potatoes in the supermarket (Since when have there been different spuds for different purposes? Mashing potatoes? Boiling potatoes? Baking potatoes? And when am I ever going to need ‘salad potatoes’?)

Hopefully you’ll be approaching your uni choices with a more rational mind. There’s a lot of information out there, true, but this can only be a good thing. Here’s a few things to think about when deciding which course is right for you.

• STUDY SOMETHING YOU ENJOY. Just in case it wasn’t rammed into your head in
  high school, I’ll say it again. If you like what you’re studying, you’ll do better at it. And when it comes to university, particularly when it comes to university study - remember there’s no teacher cracking the whip to make sure you get the work done. You might find it pretty hard to get motivated to do that hundred-page reading on contract law, when you’re really more interested in studying Jane Austen.
• DON’T BASE YOUR CHOICE ON THE UAI CUT-OFF. One of the worst things you can do is worry about ‘wasting’ your UAI by picking a course with a cut off much lower than the mark you received. The UAI cut-off is a measure of how many people want to do that course, and how many places are available. I have a friend who chose to study Arts despite her 99+ UAI. More than once she got comments like “Oh, you’re studying Arts... I thought you did better than that”. It’s an unhelpful way of thinking, and when you’re trying to pick the best course for you, it just complicates matters unnecessarily.
• VOCATIONAL OR GENERAL? These are the two main types of uni degrees. Vocational courses are the ones which prepare you for a specific profession, for example if you study Vet Science it is generally because you want to become a vet. These courses usually have a large number of compulsory elements, giving you less freedom to choose electives. More general degrees (such as arts, science or economics) are broader, allowing you to study a wider range of disciplines. Instead of taking down a strict career path generalist degrees provide you with skills that can be applied to a range of jobs. General degrees might offer less clarity and certainty in terms of what you will do at the end of your degree, but they also allow you to try different things, see what you’re interested in, and perhaps develop skills you didn’t ever think you would have.
• FINALLY, DON’T PICK A DEGREE BECAUSE YOUR FRIENDS ARE DOING IT. In a word, lame. Firstly you might end up studying something you don’t like, secondly university provides the perfect opportunity to broaden your horizons a bit. There’s 30,000 students at Sydney Uni's main campus - why not get to know a few of them?