Tertiary and Continuing Which degrees are useless/useful?

[Dory_77]

Starting a bachelor of science this year, hoping to go on in chemistry. As I understand it a masters is pretty much a must to go on in industry or research?

That or honours to PhD (particularly for research).

 

[Power Raid]

Starting a bachelor of science this year, hoping to go on in chemistry. As I understand it a masters is pretty much a must to go on in industry or research?

would you consider a discipline within engineering?

 

[Richard Pryor]

would you consider a discipline within engineering?

Not really confident enough in my maths to do an engineering course.

 

[BluesMan]

Finished my undergrad last year in Human Biology. You could kinda argue that it isn't that useful because it doesnt get you a job (it can though), as a lot of the students that graduated with me liked to whinge about. But it's a perfect undergrad for anyone wanting to pursue post grad studies in the medical/human biological area.

I'm starting a master in radiation therapy this year (2 year degree). Can't wait to get into it. fwiw, the masters is in the science & engineering faculty, not the health science faculty (which the human bio degree was).

 

[Bombermania]

I know exactly what you mean, I'm a fitter and turner by trade and I work with new grads every year and they are basically clueless, they act like they know everything but they can't apply it in the real world.
I've started getting my maths back up to scratch to go to university, all the senior engineers at my work say the best engineers are the ones who have done a trade as they understand what is required on a job in the real world and not just on paper.

These sort of comments don't surprise me and I think is general of all university degrees, part of the problem is the focus on closed book exams and group work, which does very little to challenge the student's skills although in writing that I can list many things which I learned at University as the degree I did was based on areas that I had previous experience with.

Before doing the degree I couldn't understand why employers always asked grads for experience, now I can why and what I would say to students is that they need to either get some form of experience or try and use the concepts in the real world which is easier for some degrees than others.

 

[Bombermania]

Agree. Universities were not meant to be job training institutes that teach work skills and give people pieces of paper to certify such skills. The push toward them being that is a bit worrying.

Universities were meant to be for the study of various academic disciplines. This is important to pass on the knowledge and understanding in these disciplines and to make further progress in these disciplines. Whether they are studies of law, literature or history, or science, all that knowledge and understanding is important.

Surely Universities can be both, that is be committed to skills training and research and I would argue that Universities have always been in the business of workplace training, for example law and medicine.

 

[Dory_77]

Surely Universities can be both, that is be committed to skills training and research and I would argue that Universities have always been in the business of workplace training, for example law and medicine.

Law degrees don't offer much in terms of workplace training. I've only had to do 3, maybe 4, 'real' style assessments (e.g. writing court submissions, doing client interviews etc) in my 4 years at law school. A lot of it is just same sort of assessments as other degrees: exams/essays, taught in the same way, few hours of lectures one or two hours of tutes. It gives you the knowledge, but not too much in terms of practical skills and how to use that knowledge.