I did a music production degree. The degree is fucking useless, other than it being a 1:1, which maybe nudged me ahead of other candidates in jobs in the past, but probably not.
The experience of being away at uni, learning to live away from my parents, becoming a functioning member of society, that was all priceless. I do wish I'd done a more technical degree, I would have made an excellent engineer, but ultimately doing a degree full of outgoing, social people really helped me learn how to be gregarious and charming myself, which I think more than anything has been the thing that's helped me to success.
>>6442 Pretty much this - I did humanities at a well respected uni. In hindsight would I have picked a different degree? Probably.
Did I learn a lot about myself from the uni experience, and the degree come in handy as leg up in getting certain jobs? Absolutely.
I didn't really (and still don't know) what I wanted to do with life but if I did at the age I started my degree I'd probably do one of those apprenticeships at the Big 4 or similar where you earn, learn and they pay for your degree anyway. I know a few people who followed that route and they did very well out of it.
Degrees can be limiting in certain circumstances (if you want to be a doctor, you probably need to get a degree) but I know so many people working outside their degree area. There are a lot of English grads as software developers and all that.
Life's all about learning and it isn't confined to a degree. A degree in a lot of cases just shows you are able to somewhat stick with a process in my humble view.
I have a degree and a PhD in physics, and I'm now an academic scientist. At this point, it's hard to imagine having done anything different with my life, being a scientist for a living is fuckin' sick.
I switched degrees twice, and failed all of them, so I have a bit of knowledge of two sciences and a humanities subject which I studied at a Russell Group uni.
I'm not entirely unconvinced that this place isn't some sort of ultra deep state psy-op so I'm not gonna venture forth any identifying information but I made some really good mates doing an MA and it at least tangentially helped with work and stuff.
>>6448 The fact that there are two almost identical threads, posted just five hours apart (>>/£$€¥/9125), is certainly suspicious.
I got my Psychology degree in 2008. I enjoyed it, but I have never used it ever in my life except for my first IT job, which insisted on only hiring people who got at least a 2:1 from a top-20 university. That was in 2016. In the intervening period, I alternated between NEETdom and telesales, because there's a knack to getting jobs and I don't have it. I don't think a different degree would have helped. I remember going to career days, and they all just talked about picking your favourite £50,000pa job from a list and choosing how much more to make out of it. The discovery that jobs don't come to you, and certainly didn't in late 2008, is a cause of enough anti-capitalist bitterness that I now post here.
I always wonder how those student satisfaction league tables work. I had a good time at university, even though I got no real-world skills, have very few memories worth repeating as anecdotes, and left university still a virgin. So would I have had a better time if I'd gone somewhere else? Who knows?
>>6449 >how those student satisfaction league tables work
They don't, really, do they? All of the bureaucracy and statistics related to universities are just keeping people in bullshit jobs. Ultimately, and there's been a lot of on-campus discussion of this among academics in the last decade, universities are tending towards degree printing machines, and statistics like the University of Wetwang being named top 25 in the country for student happiness 3 years after degree completion only serve as bleak reminders.
>>6449 I think when I was in final year I got a lot of emails from my uni telling me to fill out the national student satisfaction survey thing, think they offered financial incentive like being entered into a prize draw. They were very very persistent, daily emails, every lecture, even the desktop background on uni PCs, all telling you to do the survey.
I got a 2.1 in Law after spending a lot of time doing drugs and watching old episodes of The Price is Right. Then I did a Masters and hated it because I can't be trusted to manage large projects by myself.
Yeah it helped my life, I was a complete fuck-up before I went to university and it got me out of my hometown before I would've probably killed myself. I didn't go into law but I still use the skills I developed and it shaped how I now approach things. Theoretically I could've gotten where I am now in my career without a degree but I very much doubt it and I would be a whole lot less equipped to deal with matters of regulation.
>do you wish you could have done something different?
No and not only because the real world can fuck right off. I'm not handy or mechanically inclined and if I did something pretentious like philosophy I would crash and burn from all the reading material. I wouldn't do a Masters though, many people I've spoken with feel similar.
>>6451 Mine did this as well and it really started to get my back up. Looking back I'm surprised it matters for a former polytechnic where most people either picked local or randomly on the list (I did the latter).
I often wonder if I made a mistake and if things would be better for me if I'd gone to uni, but the fact is I'd probably have ended up dropping out anyway because I was an immensely introverted and awkward lad at that age. I wouldn't have been able to hack it.
The thing is I've since got over most of those issues I had as a young lad, and I'm sure if I was to go to uni now (apart from the obvious obstacle of being a 30-odd year old bloke) I'd smash it, have loads of mates and get loads of pussy. But again, that's just not how things work in real life, because I am a 30-odd year old bloke.
Done alright for mesen though. I think I'd rather live a modest life than end up middle class, though. spits on floor
>>6457 You could go back to uni now as a 30-odd-year-old bloke. You can be one of those older students who spends a month's wages in Topman before they go back in a vain attempt at being somewhat trendy around the youngsters, but who always end up looking like someone plucked them out of 2004 and dropped them into modern times.
Well that's rather the trouble isn't it. All the confidence and worldly wisdom I've gained over the past decade is meaningless when you're surrounded by dickhead zoomers who think TikTok is the height of culture. If I could travel back in time and do it then, sure, but doing it now would likely only be depressing.
I've been considering pressuring my boss into sending me on one of those degree apprenticeships, but the pressure of working while doing a relatively hard degree would probably unravel me. I think I value the easy life more than money honestly; and while it's true that the money helps you live an easier life, it means several years of stress and anxiety I could do without first.
I just have really never gotten along with the education system. I went back to college in my mid-20s to get my current job, but frankly I hated every second of it, especially as an adult learner, still being treated like a child.
I studied a foreign language at uni, which a lot of people told me was gay and pointless but now I earn lots of money with it and every European I meet is downright impressed at my existence, so perhaps the detractors were gay and pointless after all.
Considering that most people start uni around age 18 to 20 and are out again by their mid-20s, 30 is well old. You are going to struggle to fit in with the other students and make friends, because at that age, ten years age difference is an eternity. Just going by my experience of being at uni in my early 20s. We had some thirtysomethings, but they tended to avoid most parties and get togethers and formed their own social group. And if they were invited to a house party, they would politely finish one glass of red wine standing in the corner before they would leave.
In terms of your career planning though, 30 is still somewhat young. If you've had a professional career up to that point and now either want to expand your career options or go into a different field altogether, then getting an (additional) degree could be worth looking into. I wouldn't go for something too lengthy though. Getting a full medical or law degree is a risk, because you will probably not be done with it before your late 30s, especially if you have to work part time to support yourself. So you'll be 35 or 36 before you can work in those fields in earnest, at which point you will compete against 22 year olds who will do the same work for less money.
I've also heard of people going back to university in their 40s, but a lot of the time, it's going to have to be with the understanding that you are mostly doing your degree for shits and giggles.
>>6462 My parents met at university studying Modern Languages, then got married, moved to Brussels, and became astronomically wealthy with their language skills despite neither one of them having any ability to impart even a single pro tip for me. So I know you're telling the truth. Anyway, what language did you learn?
