I pay £9,000 for just FOUR hours of contact time

Studying at Durham and paying the standard £9k, am I really getting my money’s worth?

Despite Durham’s worldwide reputation for academic brilliance, there is an huge divide between the more employable BScs and us put-upon BA students.

The hordes of overworked scientists seem to resent our lack of contact hours, failing to realise the real joke here is the £9,000 price tag applies to all degrees, regardless of whether you spend 25 hours in labs, or a mere four hours a week in your department.

A typical day for an arts student

Science students see the direct result of their (and probably a bit of my) £9k every day in the hyper-modern science buildings. What with all that expensive lab equipment, yet humanities have all the time in the world to work out exactly how much each lecture hour is costing them. An English finalist will pay roughly £90 for each lecture.

£9,000 essentially buys you the most expensive library card of your life, and that’s not before the Bryson’s fines put a further dent into your student overdraft. Ironically, after all that, you probably won’t even earn as much as the science students to pay off those deceptively expensive three-day-loan fines.

The ‘kill me now’ look from 7 hours in the Bryson

Even the uni sees the divide between the BSc and the lowly BA. The science site is endlessly worked on, complete with the Calman Centre’s very own “Yum” (debatable) and art installations.

Where’s our £100,000 Geological map of the British Isles or our undeniably sinister statues? We spend (a few) hours in periodically flooded Elvet which sways between humidity and ice-box. The only explanation can be that the humanities students spend so little time actually in lectures that they are less likely to notice the dilapidated state of the buildings.

When they’re not stuck in endless lectures, labs and tutorials, science students love to moan about how much free time humanities students have. Yes, we have three hours a week, yes a 2:1 is probably a given: but our degree demands self-motivation and discipline not found in science degrees.

Endless Science lectures prove too much for some

An arts student will perpetually feel as though they should be working, they should be reading more; even when we’re sat in Flat White at 2pm, there’s no doubt even a chai latte can’t fully mask the procrastination guilt that consistently haunts a humanities student, even if their science counterparts choose to take an evening off because they’ve spent nine to five in labs.

I’m not saying a science degree isn’t hard work: but us humanities shouldn’t be dismissed all the time. Just because we have an emptier timetable than Klute on a Monday, we actually pay for your lab equipment, your lectures, and even your bloody Yum Coffee.