Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: Degree

  • Osborne’s Nursing Cuts (OR: I already know y’all hate my career choice)

    So, Osborne has cut bursaries for nurses. As my post the other day indicated – I’m struggling to see a problem with this. At all. It seems to me that nurses will be better off while at university if they take a student loan instead of a bursary, and it will enable universities to improve their offerings and take more students – which should in turn improve the quality of education and mean that other departments don’t have to fund that degree. As well as meaning that – in the long term – we have more nurses. Great. I’m struggling to see how you can be against that at all.

    However I’ve woken up to an explosion of hurtful comments about my choice of degree – and it’s hard not to take it personally. Well, not about my degree specifically, but about how we should – as a nation – not fund ‘pointless’ degrees.

    There seems to be a strong belief amongst many that the government should fully fund and bursary ‘essential’ degrees. Largely this includes degrees for teaching, engineering, maths, medicine, nursing, dentistry, etc. And that everyone else should have to pay full price – and often this belief also suggests that we shouldn’t give a student loan to anyone not doing an ‘essential’ degree.

    If I had to pick one of those ‘essential’ degrees, I would fail. I failed maths at A Level. I don’t exactly have the bedside manner to be a nurse or a doctor. Engineering largely doesn’t interest me. And teaching children, well, that career is off-limits to me than more reasons than ‘I don’t like children’.

    Besides if we *all* did those jobs it would be a total race to the bottom. We’d end up working for nothing because there would be so much competition (oh hey, just like photography and/or the art world can be sometimes/most of the time).

    “But” you say “Of course we would limit the amount of people who can do those degrees.” Well, ok. So that means that anyone not capable of doing ‘essential’ degrees has to pay for their own degree. Thus enforcing the two-tier system that the British university system has been trying to move away from for years. If you make people pay for non-essential degrees up front (and pay for their expenses while they do those degrees) then you end up with only the rich being able to afford education. And that would be a very bad thing (again).

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    I love this drawing. I’ve seen it pop up time and time again and I think it’s just great. Not because it places art as one of the most important things in an alternative hierarchy of needs, but because I think it reinforces the fact that in our modern society it shouldn’t be about ‘existing’ it should be about living. I think people don’t understand that society is so much wider than just the essentials. Without the complex interaction that compliments the other subjects we’re just fucked. And we’re possibly even more fucked if those complex interactions are led by only those people who can afford to self fund a degree at 18.

    But I often feel like people misunderstand what I do on my degree in particular. Art History is a subject that is all about research and analysis. It’s a very powerful degree, it enables you to take both written and visual sources and turn them into something extremely meaningful (well, you hope that anyway). It’s not all about art. Modern art history is as much about the society that creates the art as it is about the way that the works were produced. It is a subject that helps us to make sense of the world around us, to see what has happened in the past and apply those lessons in the future.

    It seems that a subject like art history (amongst many others) is as essential to a productive and happy society as any of the aforementioned ‘essential’ subjects. So why do so many people tell me that my degree is worthless, pointless, and a drain on the social benefits system?

  • Independent Study Module

    Today there was good news to be had at university!

    We’re making the module selections for our second and third years (seems so far away…) at university. One of the reasons I picked this course was because of the independent study module that we can opt to take in the second year. It’s been agreed in principle that I can take it and I just have to meet with the head of department in two weeks in order to discuss my programme options and start putting ideas together.

    I figured it would be interesting to document the process here and to go through the process of designing, writing and then ultimately studying my course. And I suppose if you follow along then you might also be doing a second year module in something related to photography!

    That’s going to be my subject choice – photography. I’m hoping to do a photography related dissertation in my third year and so this would provide me with the time to get a base foundation of knowledge sorted before I attempt that in my third year.

    But exciting times lie ahead! Assuming the drive home from Oxford tonight isn’t too torturous, I plan on starting some ideas for plans tonight. Nothing like being totally over prepared for my meeting.

  • Teaching basic study skills to those who don’t want to learn

    I know, a longwinded post title, right?

    My intention in this post is not to ‘call anyone out’ or to diss those who lecture me if they happen to somehow read this. My lecturers know how much I love the course I’m doing and that my feedback is overwhelmingly positive. With that said, here we go.

    As I settle into the second semester of my undergrad degree at the ancient age (compared to my classmates) of twenty eight there are some things that are bothering me. The hangovers of my colleagues I can just about manage. I can even mostly handle the irritation of people lacking respect for the lecturers by whispering to each other (no matter how quiet you think you are, you’re not) and the constant need to check phones. But one thing stands out.

    It’s the lack of ambition.

    I had this dream that university would be this place where everyone was there with a common goal. There would be hours lost debating art historical politics and investigating radical, revolutionary artists. On how we should deal with ‘the female problem’ and the canon of dead white guys. Or anything exciting. You know, time spent in the library together pouring over exciting journals and visits to exhibitions.

    Apparently not.

    I mean, I’d settle for just ‘interested in class’ and ‘does the minimum background reading’ but it seems that people don’t even want to do that.

    In the first semester one of our modules had two pieces of coursework. The first was a guided bibliography where we were directed to investigate, in steps, an artwork and basically compile a bibliography for a fantasy essay that we had not written. We had to write about why we selected those sources. The second piece of coursework was a guided essay with a set of questions to think about that led us through the process of constructing an essay. We had a similar one for our architecture course but it didn’t seem as forced. I treated these pieces of work with my usual level of contempt and go the

    The issue I have with these pieces of work is this. They should not be taught at undergraduate level.

    I appreciate that during A Levels you may not do subjects where you are taught how to approach research or write a bibliography, I certainly wasn’t taught these skills since I did physics, maths and music technology all those years ago. However when I came to do my first essay with the Open University we were simply thrown in at the deep end with nothing more than a ‘study skills’ guide and the phone number of our tutor. We were expected to go away and teach ourselves form the myriad of resources available how to write an essay.

    This stuff isn’t rocket science. I would expect anyone who is capable of studying at undergraduate level to have the ability and the drive to go and find this stuff out. It’s not as if writing essays is a surprise on the course, you have to do it on every undergraduate course. To be honest if you can’t even be bothered to look up how to write a correct essay then you’re not going to get very far.

    Lets put this in real terms. Each module costs me £1125 which is quite a lot of money to someone who doesn’t have very much. I want to spend that £1125 on learning and being tested to find out where my abilities lie – not being taught how to write an essay. Now obviously not all of the teaching on the module was spent teaching these skills, but a surprisingly large portion of it was. It was just frustrating.

    But the frustration is not directed at my lecturers, the course or the university system. My frustration is directed to my colleagues who do not seem to want to open a book and learn something for themselves.