Durham or Bristol

Anonymous #1

I need to decide between Philosophy at Bristol and Psychology at Durham... any advice?

Reply 1

Carrotsroom

From my understanding, those 2 courses are widely different so it really depends what course your leaning onto rather than the university. If you havent already, check the modules for both courses and watch some videos from each unis that students post on Youtube. Durham has already released provisional college allocations to so if you haven't yet it might be something you need to consider. Also have a think about the travelling and distance and whether that affects you and whether you're bothered about living in a smaller city.

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Reply 2

Anonymous #1

Original post by Carrotsroom

Thanks that’s really helpful! I’ve been allocated a college so that’s really useful in terms of imagining myself there. I think I’m leaning towards Durham because of the sports and college system, but I’ll be sad to turn down Bristol and it’s such a fun city!

Reply 3

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

As above, very different courses. I'd note that if you want to go into any professional psychologist role (e.g. clinical psychology, forensic psychology, educational psychology etc) you need a BPS accredited degree - so if you did a philosophy degree and wanted to go that route, you'd need to do a master's conversion course.

For anything else though it won't really make much different what subject you study, so in that frame you just need to think about which you find more interesting and enjoy more. Particularly think about the methods of teaching, learning, and assessment - for philosophy I anticipate there would be a lot of reading, with lectures and discussion based classes/seminars/tutorials, and then a lot of assessment by essay and essay based exams. For psychology you would have some of that kind of assessment, but also labs, assessment by problem sheets/data analysis, and likely both "practical" lab based assessments as well as lab write ups, and the exams may have more of a mix of short answer, MCQ, long answer, and data based questions.