Ask Fred: Students

DEAR FRED,

I've just elected to study a degree in Art History, but my parents say that's a waste of time and I'll never get a job at the end of it. It's not too late to try something else. What should I do?

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Picking the right degree to pursue is a balance between 'studying something you love' and 'studying something that will actually make you semi-employable at the end of it'. From school you're led to believe that you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up, but if this were true, we'd all be living in a world populated entirely by cowboys, Thundercats, Ghostbusters or Lynda Carter's vagina-testers.

'Your only limit is your imagination' and 'follow your dreams' is the kind of fruity bullshit reserved for mysterious kung fu masters, but there's a reason why those guys tend to give that advice between scrubbing toilets or giving hand-jobs at bus stops; ninja-crime-foiling is far less lucrative than you might expect.

But by all means, pick some fucking nonsense that makes you happy. Study the shit out of it. Edinburgh University once offered a degree in 'Introduction to Astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life,' which was effectively five weeks of watching Farscape episodes then receiving a certificate printed on the back of a list of fast-food vacancies.

Meanwhile it's a statistical fact that around 80% of students who successfully study Dentistry, Sciences or Animal Husbandry at university will find gainful employment in the career of their specialty. Sure, a dentist may not hold a degree in knowing which hole you should fuck a Chewbacca through, but that's exactly why I'm happy to let them near my mouth.

The cold, hard truth is that waiting for you at the end of your two-to-four years of toga parties and drug overdoses is a shitty Thunderdome of responsibilities, bills and obligations. It's up to you as to how you choose to enter it; with nothing but a cowboy hat and a smile, or with the confident tools to make that world a little bit less shitty.

Study whatever the fuck you like, be happy, but probably aim to be long-term happy. If you're smart enough (and driven enough) to get on the course you wanted, then you'll find personal value and reward in your efforts. Life ain't the 9-to-5 bit where you steal stationery and masturbate in the toilets, it's the everything else that ISN'T THAT.

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DEAR FRED,

I've got a lot of essays due, and there's an exam worth 50% of my mark in 8 weeks. I work part-time and I'm tempted to buy a completed essay from the internet, or just copy an old one. Is this a good plan?

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Lecturers and Exam Assessors didn't get where they are today by being unable to identify an essay that is 98% cut and pasted from Wikipedia. Education isn't just regurgitating someone else's words – it's about learning those words, reflecting on them and then adding your own intelligent insight into them (or at the very least, changing them enough so they don't notice the words are copied from Yahoo! Answers). Take the learning of others and put it to practical use. Earn your degree and make it mean something... and remember, Wikipedia cannot be trusted. It once went 3 weeks before someone corrected the fact that Heath Ledger DIDN'T die from 'an ass filled with jam.' That kind of mistake could be all that stands between you and a degree in Dentistry.