Do you ever wonder why people apply for their courses?

You can be passionate about history and business at the same time, though. But it doesn't mean you should do a degree in business.

When I was applying to university the rhetoric surrounding business as a degree was completely negative, people wouldn't condone doing a soft degree like business at all, it was too specific and most people in a business or entrepreneurs don't study business beforehand, so why spend three years of your life doing it?

Someone might study history, with a passion for it, wanting to spend 3 years learning more about it before they get a job in the real world. It's fair enough. I did think along the same lines when I was younger. I was always passionate about English, and knew that doing English didn't mean you'd have to go into English, but then I decided on medicine for the job security (fortunately, I don't regret it at all). Schools put people under such pressure to think what they want to do for the rest of their lives that they have to decide for sure when they're 16 then go into a degree in something they may later regret, and they're so concerned with this idea of going straight into uni then getting a job straight after that they mislead people into thinking that their degree has to somehow equate to the job they want afterwards. This thread is proof of that.

People forget that a degree isn't necessarily a job credential but rather a qualification by which they measure the extent to which you are intellectually sound and your ability to work hard. If you want to go into academia you do a masters, then probably further study afterwards.

Actually, I think that all useless degrees should be withdrawn from uni's prospectus and instead money should go for training people in usefull degrees such as law, economics, sciences and medicine. Its a pity only few schools offer medicine while English literature is avaible everywhere.

personally, there are many occasions where I've seen someone say "I'm applying for ____" and I've just had a brief moment of wondering why on earth?

but then I remember that relatively few people apply for the course I've applied for (Linguistics), and mainly based on passion, since the career prospects are quite limited, so it makes sense that others apply for the courses they're passionate about even if I can't understand it

do you ever feel like that? if yes, about which courses?

I get this with "boring" courses and ones that don't seem to have any job opportunities, like Old Norse or other Medival Languages!! What?? Who's studying that? That's a legitimate option I saw at an open day. I would actually be rrly interested in speaking to someone who was wanting to or does!
Though I'm in the same boat! I want to study Russian & East and Central European Studies sooo yeah bit of a weird choice! It's very hard to find other ppl interested in that!

(a) This thread is ancient.
(b) I imagine Old Norse is pretty useful if you want an academic career researching the Poetic Edda or something. Alternatively, lots of non-vocational degrees will leave you with enough transferrable skills to go into any number of jobs.

Oh whoops haha, didn't check the year it was posted lol 😂😂
Yeah that's what I imagine but it still sounds difficult to get a career in, I mean I'm always hearing about ppl who've got degrees in pretty common fields yet cannot for the life of them find a job but maybe a niche degree can actually be better in that sense.
Yeah that's what I've heard a lot, especially about languages, I mean obviously I'd rrly like to use the Russian degree in my future career, maybe working for some company and communicating with Russian customers and business partners or travelling to Russia to represent the company etc but being realistic I'll probably just get a job unrelated to the degree, that seems more common which is a shame :/