Where has your modern foreign languages degree taken you?

Up to last year (last year was my year abroad) I had been studying German and Spanish. I spent the year in Germany and realised I did not particularly want to put it another year's worth of slogging and messing up my work-life balance just to come out with a degree in Single Hons German (I stayed in Germany because it was easier to at the time). I did however travel to Denmark a lot and got a Danish boyfriend (and am now on my second Danish boyfriend, after that ended) and realised I like Denmark and Danes and Danish culture a hell of a lot more than I like Germany. My year abroad made me feel like I might not want to live abroad in the future, but thankfully my experiences in Denmark made me realise I was just trying to make it work in the wrong culture. I've dropped out of my degree just before final year and am doing various things and chilling out while working (VERY HARD) on my Danish and preparing myself to move over there for the foreseeable future.

If I'd finished my degree I'd have been stuck with the typical language graduate choice of 'do I become a teacher? civil/diplomatic servant? translator? enter the world of banking?'. People go on about how a languages degree doesn't limit you to anything, but neither does it point you in much of a direction. If you haven't got something in particular you'd like to do afterwards you might end up being faced with what looks like a pretty unsatisfactory choice, unless you suddenly sprout an imagination. I'm looking at doing something totally different in Denmark, perhaps Medicine or perhaps Architecture or something related to it. Perhaps something else, perhaps I'll work on more languages and go into translation or similar. The problem, however, is that while I'm a total language freak and love being able to learn and use different languages, none of the jobs such as translation would hold my attention for very long. The chance of me ever wanting to teach or be a civil servant or (jesus) go into banking are approximately 0.00000000001 as well.

So I'm just going to enjoy my languages as they are and see where I go from here. The way I'm learning my Danish actually feels a lot more organic and enjoyable than the language work at uni did, but that is most likely because I'm something of a seasoned linguist by now. I can't help but wonder whether I'd be able to speak any language to a particularly high degree (beyond A-level I mean) if I hadn't embarked on a languages degree.

If you're fluent in more than 1 language already, it may be a better idea to gain a degree in something else. That way you can use your language skills in whatever job you train for.

You don't really paint a very optimistic picture of it Thing is I'm very skilled in languages, and surely they're more useful than a degree in say history, or English? Do you know what any of your ex-colleagues went into after their degree?

By the way, I love Germany and the Germans

A languages degree essentially involves something like a History and an English degree (among other things), with focus on other cultures and languages. So comparing those isn't really helpful. I'd certainly rather do another languages degree than do English or History. As I said, I'm looking at going into Architecture or Medicine, which in contrast to those degrees you mention will qualify me for a particular career area which I would be interested in working in. If you have no idea what else you might want to do, there's nothing stopping you from doing a degree in languages. There are, after all, conversion courses in Psych and Law, and the Graduate Medicine degree, so there are ways to get into certain things after doing a different degree.

My ex-coursemates are in their final year. I know of people from other years going into teaching or trying to work their way into publishing though. One is doing a Law conversion course. I think one might work for Erdinger Weissbräu but I'm not sure.

By the way, I loved Germany and the Germans too, before I actually lived and worked with them for an entire year. I'd taken part in a German exchange at school approximately 3 times, stayed with the same family again in my gap year, lived in Berlin for a month while I was on a summer course, and been to Berlin on brief trips aside from that. During my year abroad I lived in three different towns/cities. Under the surface, taking into account all the good things, overall the balance was just not in Germany's favour for me. I knew I could be much happier elsewhere. And when you think of yourself as someone who wants to travel and experience other cultures and societies and you end up realising you view home in the UK as preferable to the foreign culture you're in, it becomes kind of obvious that perhaps you should write this one off and try a different one if you don't want to have regrets later in life.

The good thing about a language degree is that it leaves a lot of doors open, + will give you the added skill of a language (if you work hard at it). You aren't guided to any specific career, which is good in some ways, bad in others. If you decide, OK, I want to do XYZ after uni, then while you are at uni you can focus yourself towards that goal (as I am doing - getting experience etc). But you can just as easily drift through your course not getting any kind of work experience, skills etc. and then come out the other end with few prospects (as with most Arts degrees).

Thus I know people, from my uni who did my degree, who have gone straight into Investment Banking or Law, and others who are now working the tills at ASDA or Xmas temping at Debenhams. It's really down to you. Your degree matters far less than you.

The good thing about a language degree is that it leaves a lot of doors open, + will give you the added skill of a language (if you work hard at it). You aren't guided to any specific career, which is good in some ways, bad in others. If you decide, OK, I want to do XYZ after uni, then while you are at uni you can focus yourself towards that goal (as I am doing - getting experience etc). But you can just as easily drift through your course not getting any kind of work experience, skills etc. and then come out the other end with few prospects.　(And I think this is the case for most arts degrees).

Thus I know people, from my uni who did my degree, who have gone straight into Investment Banking or Law, and others who are now working the tills at ASDA or Xmas temping at Debenhams. It's really down to you. Your degree matters far less than you.

The problem with this is that some people go into languages with no idea of some specific area of work they want to work towards. If I'd gone into academia or translation I would probably have sailed fairly comfortably into it without having collected leadership/organisational/volunteering experience because that's what my degree was for, and I considered going into Linguistics or something afterwards, but I ended up reconsidering whether I'd really enjoy it however many years down the line. I'm a total language freak which meant that I enjoyed my degree enough to not necessarily have much of an idea of where I wanted to go with it.

I'm working as a civil service translator. In retrospect though, I would have been better off studying another subject and then studying translation postgrad.

What would you have studied instead?