Whenever I tell people I'm considering going to SOAS I get one of two reactions:
"....sorry, where?"
"oh wow, yeah, SOAS is really good, congrats"
With the ratio being 75:35. Basically, I'm scared that no one (employers included, both abroad and in the UK) will have heard of it.
Exeter is nice, but I
really want to learn Chinese, and they barely offer anything beyond beginner-intermediate language modules. So I'm only half-considering it.
The Goldsmiths course I like most of all because it offers the chance to take a fifth year abroad and get an additional BA in Chinese from Capital Normal University in Beijing... but Goldsmiths has a terrible academic reputation for politics, both domestic and worldwide.
I've fiddled around with my course choice at Leeds and now my offer is AAB for Chinese and Economics. Which sounds like the most solid of the lot, basically, and feels like the most employment-secure option too. But I'm not into economics at all. I mean, I enjoy reading softer economics books (Ha-Joon Chang, say), but I tried studying it at A-level
and IB (long story) and it was just so, so soul-crushingly dull.
I kinda wanna go to SOAS but their admin scares me. I've read some reviews of it online and I keep hearing that it takes up to 10 months to receive your degree certificate after graduation, which isn't even signed properly... people's names misspelled correctly, module marks getting mixed up, coursework submissions getting lost and people getting 0 for those modules, etc. I don't know what to do.