Which Durham degree is the biggest waste of money?

Probs not Engineering

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English Literature 

You’ve made a decision to get into debt to sit in your room and read books. You could have stayed at home for three years and done exactly that, and not have to put up with college’s shite food. In freshers year you only do six essays, each of which are written at the same time, with no room for feedback.

All your essays will have the same mistakes and all of your seminar leaders will critique the same thing: this is not learning. During freshers lectures cost around £60, but as the years go on and the contact hours start dropping away, along with your apparent passion for literature, each hour will be worth their weight in gold.

Theology

God. That’s what it’s about, right? ‘No’, some old white man says as he throws “History of Christianity” at your face while also making jokes about an obscure book of the Old Testament. Oh you don’t know the RABBIS: they wrote the Targum you dumb goy! Then after rubbing your head, reading a bit of the Bible and occasionally going to your severely light timetable, you realise no employer wants you. Welcome to secretarial work at some shitty accountancy firm. Mazel tov.

Maths

Useless and abstract. Sequences and convergence. When do we really need this? I can tell that £1.99 tends towards £2, I do not need a maths degree to spot this. The fact that most people leave the lectures more confused than when they entered speaks volumes of how abstract and distant maths is from the real world. Paying £9,000 a year, only to be taught by Wikipedia and YouTube is definitely a waste of money, and you end up with the interpersonal skills of a slug.

Classics

You speak not only one, but two dead languages that will never be relevant to life. Gearing up for your Law conversion, you actually spend most of your time convincing people Socrates truly is the basis of the western world. And yes your prep school teacher told you that Classics at Oxford is treated as the same as PPE, you now know it’s not.

“Remembering Athens” on a Tuesday afternoon is literally people remembering fifth century Athens – while in Latin classes you translate English into Latin for no rational reason at all. Accountancy is beckoning and all the other Classics students will eventually abandon their high brow dedication to Caesar.

History of Art

Relegated to an elective only module, History of Art isn’t actually a degree. You spend your time watching films or instead gazing at an animated slideshow – complete with sound effects. The faux edgy girls who have just left slummy boarding schools rush to Starbucks in the ten minute allotted break, with their names like Arabella, Olive and Tofu emblazoned on the cups.

It’s all well and good in the first two years but when applying for jobs during a lecture on post-Modern interpretations of Surrealism you use those apparently useful skills of analysis to see History of Art as the folly it really is.

International Relations

Three years of studying the intricacies of the political spectrum and the same thing can be said in one sentence: “the world’s fucked.” Wide eyed freshers ready to fix the world soon accept the reality that no, attending one Amnesty rally in Durham high street won’t change the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women.

And forget about attaining any significant position in the UN, unless your name causes BBC 24 newsreaders some anxiety. Unpaid internship for Brian May’s badger protection group, here you go. IR: International Relations? More like Internal Regret.

These people

Economics

I have never met an Economics student who actually gives a shit about Economics. Let’s be honest, we’re all doing it just to get on that EY grad scheme. You don’t even meet interesting people, because your lectures are filled with Barbour Jacket and shirt combo wearing rugger buggers, who went to the same private schools and spunked on the same soggy biscuits for ‘banter’.

The entire degree is the same three theories retaught every year because the lecturers can’t communicate with each other to explain what they taught the year before.  The only actually Economics we do in our entire three years is avoiding doing Economics by picking that business or marketing module that had loads of 2:1 last year, or your brother’s mate send he’d send you the master-notes for. Truly the corporate sellout of degrees.

Politics

£9,000 a year to sit in a cold smelly tutorial room somewhere near Trevs to listen to some indie shit, with unfashionably long hair, drone on about liberty, or election bias, or some equally uninterested topic.  You don’t give a shit, because that’s not one of three (out of eighteen) topics you’ve chosen to specialise in this year because you know they’ll come up in the exam.

Your science mates tell you you’re learning something useful, but no, you’re not a great conversation because you don’t learn about politics that is relevant, or interesting. Instead you learn about some cunt called Kant, and that’s why you’ll be unemployed.

PPE

You heard it’s the course to do because your inevitable idol/nemisis Davey Cam did it at Oxford, but you didn’t get in. People raise their eyebrows and look impressed when you tell them, and that’s nice. But in reality you learn fuck all, which is the worst because you’re actually genuinely interested. You never break past the core modules, which teach you nothing you really want to learn about.

Your mate on straight Economics is doing a module on Economics of Social Policy, which you’d love to do, but can’t because you’re stuck doing Intermediate Micro.  And apparently these seemingly three unconnected subjects have something to do with each other, but you’ll never find that out because three is just too many ways to split a degree. It’s essentially combined honours in a tux.

Marketing degree going well

Marketing

For £9,000 a year Marketing students have the pleasure of sitting in an empty lecture theatre and listening to a barely audible foreign lecturer tell us eleven hours a week worth of things we already know. “Here’s an advert for Dove, what do you think about it?”: definitely something I could be asking myself at home in my onesie mid-Netflix.

Our books are £90 a go and we use approximately four pages of each book throughout our entire three-year degree. And, in our first pointless year of university, we enjoy five out of six modules that have absolutely nothing to do with Marketing. I mean, I’m not really sure “Business Decision Making” is something I’ll be using when developing ad campaigns in the future. Plus we’re on Queens, ouch.

Anthropology

We have a whole module based on defining Anthropology – because no one really knows. There’s a solid 80:20 girls to boys ratio. Against all laws of nature, reading computer science would be better for my dry spell. They keep trying to recruit us into archaeology.

No, I do not want to spend all day on my knees handling bones – unless its reciprocal of course. My lecturer nearly speared me in my Tribal Cultures lecture. With a penis sheath. I was nearly speared. That is not an experience worth £9,000. On the plus side, I haven’t had to do any work yet. 8 weeks in to uni & chill and I’d like some more uni please.

Chemistry

It’s shit. The only thing I’ve learn during my degree is that I never want to hear about Chemistry again. Not getting a 2:1 is a genuine fear. Art students range from a low 2:1 to a high 2:1, but Chemistry student ranges from a fail to a low 2:1. Five out of six words of my dissertation title have red lines under them.

And knowing the interatomic distance of sodium and chloride doesn’t get me any further to why salt tastes like salt. But the real kick in the balls is after 28 hours of lectures, and far more than the recommended 40 hour weeks that art students laugh at, we still end up on the same fucking grad scheme as that cock from Econ.

Law

Granted, law gets you a good job and a steady salary – but at what cost? You’re paying twenty-seven thousand pounds to do something that is generally regarded as the most boring thing in the world. You can’t even feign passion for it; no one’s going to believe that you both secretly love the nuances of EU constitutional law and aren’t a fucking sociopath. You picked law because you’re fundamentally dull, you wanted a degree that patted you on the back and assured you that your lack of creativity was welcome here.

The subjectivity of history or PPE or philosophy or theology terrified you, so you chose to do something that other, more interesting and well-rounded, people can do in a year after they’ve completed a degree they actually like. And you know what?

They’re just as likely to get that training contract as you are; even more so since the last three years turned you into a robot, devoid of anything that even slightly resembles a personality. You can’t even have a human conversation without bringing it back to the clinical safety of law; you didn’t sell your soul – you paid them nearly thirty grand to take it away.

Sociology

Obviously, it has to be the subject that’s the butt of all the ‘you only got in through clearing’ jokes. Useful on if you think learning what old bearded white guys thought about society 150 years ago is useful for your future job prospects. And if the only future job prospect you want is ‘sociology teacher’. It’s not practical enough to be psychology, or interesting enough to be politics, it’s just a shit middle ground between all of the subjects you wish you were doing.

Languages

We’re paying nine grand to learn another language, something most of the world manage without a degree. In comparison to the Sciences, we linguists aren’t really getting our money’s worth. With next to no contact hours and most lecturers just reading off powerpoint slides, I kind of wish I just spent £9000 moving to another country.

Speaking Spanish but with shit weather, learning French but with wank wine, and stumbling over Italian but without the gorgeous guys. We’re funding Science students playing around in labs, and Geography trips to places we should really be going, since being in a foreign country is the best way to improve your language skills.

Geography

Most of our £9,000 goes into funding the communal Crayola box which needs regular replenishing, particularly those blues and greens for our beloved maps. The whole subject is an obvious target for overused jokes about how well you colour between the lines, how you spend your life looking at rocks and how despite all that money, you still don’t know the capital of Bahrain.

An easy way out for those who didn’t hit the A* in the grittier sciences and don’t have the mathematical aptitude for economics, geography is a direct funnel into the teaching career, or failing that, unemployment.