Arts Degrees.... Who Cares

LoLth

from a moderator standpoint: Keep this thread civil. any more personal comments will not be tolerated. Efla and Effluo (are you sure you're not a couple?) , take a step back, breathe and feel free to make a point if you still feel like it but keep it civil. Effluo , perhaps something a little more descriptive (and relevant) than "douche" would help your point.

from my own point of view: care to clarify your question ? I certainly dont think someone working as a surveyor would regret studying geography and going on to study remote sensing. I doubt a journalist would regret studying English and i seriously doubt anyone who works in a project based environment would regret having to regulate their own time and adhere to deadlines.

As for your question: ""Do you think all your 1000 word essays and books that you're supposed to read are actually benefitting you?
Or is most of it indeed a big pile of douche?(as i have experienced...)"

I would say it varies from student to student. If the student read/wrote the essays and just did the bare minimum, remembered it for an exam and forgot about it afterwards then no, i dont think they benefitted. if however, they did the work as it was intended, if they related it to other information on their course, found undertones and/or used it as an opportunity to improve their level of understanding then I fail to see how anyone can say they didnt benefit or call it a waste, even if they end up working in an unrelated sector. Education , of any type (well except starcraft or klingon) is never a waste.

the material is the same for everyone in the class. I would say it says more about the student and not the degree if they feel like they've wasted their time when they reach the end.

Effluo

I wondered about the actual course work I did and the guys in my house were doing.

Yes of course studying english "should" help someone going into journalism.
But i had the feeling that the modules were very bitty and might not benefit the aspiring journalist at all!

Thus bringing back to what i have been trying to get at from the start... the educational value!

jane says

I think it is now time for an application of


OP is not going anywhere with this.

Effluo

I (the op) agree.....

LoLth

Effluo wrote: »

I wondered about the actual course work I did and the guys in my house were doing.

Yes of course studying english "should" help someone going into journalism.
But i had the feeling that the modules were very bitty and might not benefit the aspiring journalist at all!

Thus bringing back to what i have been trying to get at from the start... the educational value!

well, the educational value of any course really depends on the student studying it and their career expectations when they have finished it.

You want to be a researcher in a pharmaceutical company you study chemistry or biology. Obviously studying history and Classical french literature wouldnt have much educational value. Similarly, I wouldnt see biology as having much relevance to a career in , say, mechanical engineering (I could be wrong about this though so anyone please feel free to correct me).

As for the course being "bitty". well, you could be right. maybe the course doesnt do enough on 16th century english romantic literature but without specialisation (and thus the risk of marginalisation) there is a lot of ground to cover in Arts courses - I used to sit in on sociology lectures in Maynooth even though I wasnt studying sociology and I was very impressed with the range the course covered. If you feel that the course didnt go into enough depth in an area you were interested in then perhaps the course wasnt right for you or, perhaps you should have done more reading in your own time to go further along that particular track? (I'm saying "you" but I am meaning any student that feels the way you do). When it comes to exams: the faculty can only examine what they have taught on the curriculum. It would be unfair to include a question on a very obscure poet if that poet wasnt explicitly included on the course as not everyone would have the interest in that section to continue their studies to a degree that covered that particular poet in enough detial to be able to answer a question on his works or be familiar enough to be able to compare him to another author.

If you mean "educational value" in terms of quantifiable education then I would humbly suggest that most , if not all, arts courses measure up quite well to science courses in terms of material learned, ok, it might look easy to some but that just makes it harder to stand out from the crowd (if everyone fails all you ahve to do to be noticed is pass, if everyone passes you need to get a grade higher to stand out etc). Ultimately it is almost impossible to say X teaches you more than Y , or X is more useful than Y. if that were the case, we would all be learning survival skills because if you get stuck in the wilderness with no food or shelter being able to recite Keats' works wont do you much good but if the situation ever arises that the lock on a fire escape to get out of your well provisioned and now burning apartment is protected by a passphrase which is a line from a keats poem you're going to be pretty annoyed at learning how to start fires and trap small animals instead of hitting the books

Also, its important to note that education isnt just the material you memorise. A good education will develope the way you analyse that information and relate it to other, at first seemingly unrelated, facts and ideas.

personally i think that the aspiring journalist should have studied journalism and that Arts english would be a second choice, still relevant but not as useful for that particular career path (my personal opinion), in which case, if journalism was what he wanted to do and he didnt select journalism as his course then the fault does not lie with the material beign presented but in either his lack of foresight or his lack of motivation to bend the knowledge being presented toward his own agenda.

ps. in fairness, you werent asking about the educational value of arts courses in your original post (or if you were it was not clear), you stated categorically that it was "douche" and asked why anyone would bother studying arts. the phrase "Do you think all your 1000 word essays and books that you're supposed to read are actually benefitting you?" is particularly ill informed and shows a lack of understandign on your part. Personally I've only ever read three books that I feel did not benefit me in the slightest ( catcher in the rye - sorry, I know its a classic but I hated it and everything about it, cobweb by Neal Stephenson - rubbish and sub standard for such a usually well written and researched author , Battlefield Earth - ehhh, yeah.... ), the very process of writing and reading benefits the student let alone the material being read/written.

partyguinness

Hello everybody. I feel like trolling but I am feeling a bit shy so I think I shall practise trolling here before I start trolling on other boards:

NUI Maynooth...who cares?

how was that? trollish enough? sarky enough? are you now in awe of my towering intellect? or perhaps you have now seen the inner rebel in me waiting to emerge like a butterfly from its crysalis? if so, please PM me and let me know how beautiful and pretty you think I am. I like having my ego stroked almost as much as I like my post count.

LoLth

jane says wrote: »

I think it is now time for an application of


OP is not going anywhere with this.

actually the OP has raised a point that is based on a belief that many people (including me at one stage) hold to be true. Sure , his wording may have been just murky enough to cause misconception and to , justifiably , rub some boardsies the wrong way - seriously, you honestly wouldnt find someone calling what you studied for years and probably found quite difficult in the later years a "waste of time and effort" (paraphrased) offensive? - and I believe anyone that wishes to put forward their view deserves that chance.

the thread has not descended so far that its not savable and if it did descend, it is more likely that those causing the problem would have their posts deleted/edited and possibly their account barred from the forum. Locking the thread is not the way to settle an argument or end a discussion. Its a way of shutting up muppets or dealing with offensive/objectionable material and cutting off problems after they have degraded to a point where its not worth the effort to get it back on track.


on a side note: OP, you did the first year of an Arts course? i did too. maths and I found it a good bit easier than leaving cert honours maths but seeing as not everyone studied LC honours maths it served as a very good way to get everyone up to the same level of mathematical ability. I heard that 2nd and 3rd year maths ramped up the difficulty considerably. In a way, i was actually sorry I couldnt keep maths on as a subject... perhaps this is similar to what you experienced ? you were already above the level of 1st year whatever but fail to see that the purpose is to cater to all students and gradually raise the bar to a level suitable to tackle the 2nd year materials ?

Ostrom

Effluo wrote: »

I wondered about the actual course work I did and the guys in my house were doing.

Yes of course studying english "should" help someone going into journalism.
But i had the feeling that the modules were very bitty and might not benefit the aspiring journalist at all!

Thus bringing back to what i have been trying to get at from the start... the educational value!

Your OP did not make your motivations clear.

Either way the debate is unresolvable

Since neither of us can do more than speak from experience (a point I hope we can both agree on - without generalisation), one of the most rewarding things for me about teaching journalists this year has been the diversity of input from students of many disciplinary backgrounds.

The majority had arts degrees, (very few, surprisingly, had come from a conventional journalism degree), some had science degrees, and the debates and assignments reflected this without prestige. English graduates drew on criticisms of cultural context and applied it to studies of middle-eastern media institutions, philosophy graduates questioned the validity of the investigative framework, sociology graduates talked about comparative discourses...

Considering the working environment and limited journalistic conventions they will inevitably be forced to conform to, an arts degree in this case is essential

I am assuming you are a first year, and so as yet are unable to view an arts degree in its broader context - please dont take this personally

Effluo

efla wrote: »

Your OP did not make your motivations clear.

Either way the debate is unresolvable

Does anyone else here not understand what i'm saying in the post quoted above by efla?

I kind of feel i should take some kind of course on "getting your point across"

LoLth

Effla quoted your last post but he is talking about your original post. (hence the term "your OP"

starflake

Effluo wrote: »

Does anyone else here not understand what i'm saying in the post quoted above by efla?

I kind of feel i should take some kind of course on "getting your point across"

God love ye

Effluo

LoLth wrote: »

Effla quoted your last post but he is talking about your original post. (hence the term "your OP"

Oopsy daisies,
yeah just got that now!

The reason i've come back to this is cause a mate of mine saw this and was wondering if it was me.

Also someone refered to this and me as being "trollish" after me poking into what many people believe is true, regarding to the mature students.

After rereading it all there were some good points made and some childish references to bad spelling.

A lot of misunderstanding, some personal slights and again thought provoking posts.



Everyone knows that a lot of naturally talented people can walk into a lot of arts exams and get over 40%

Right?

Now how are these same exams which a lot of people can get over 2 fifths without doing course work or revision, How are these exams adequate in determining what you know about a certain subject?
Does this not go someways to proving the point that some arts subjects tend to be quite vague?


I decided to post this here as i believe that it is in a way a follow on from the original thought.


Cheers in advance for responding in a clear and non offensive manner.

Rozabeez

In my own experience the continous assessment is what keeps me afloat in college. I DO need to study for exams, I tend to need to work harder for subjects based solely on exams. It really depends on the person I think, but I'd say most Arts subjects focus a lot on the continous assesment side of things, which is why people come out with over 40% in the overall module, we rarely get the actual exam results back.