How to Choose a University Course You Will Not Regret

Most people choose a course by picking a job title and working backwards. Doctor, engineer, lawyer, accountant. Then four years later a large number of them are doing something else entirely, and a smaller number are stuck doing the thing they named at seventeen and no longer want.

The problem is not ambition. It is that a job title is a very thin piece of information. It tells you what something is called and almost nothing about what the days are like, what the work actually involves, or whether you would be any good at it.

Better question: what do you want to be doing at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday? That sounds trivial and it is the most useful thing on this page, because it is the only version of the question that describes a life rather than a label.

Find out what the work actually is

Every profession has a public image and a daily reality, and they overlap less than you would hope.

Law is imagined as argument in a courtroom and is mostly reading and drafting documents. Medicine is imagined as diagnosis and is substantially administration, long shifts and difficult conversations. Engineering is imagined as building and is often meetings, specifications and revising other people’s drawings.

None of that makes them bad choices. People who love those jobs love the reality, not the image. The point is that you should be choosing the reality.

So find someone doing it and ask them three specific questions:

• What did you actually do yesterday, hour by hour?
• What is the worst part, the one nobody mentions?
• What did you expect that turned out to be wrong?

Ask a teacher, a relative, someone at your church or mosque, anyone two or three steps ahead of you. Most people are pleased to be asked and answer honestly, and twenty minutes of this is worth more than any amount of reading about careers.

Separate the course from the career

These are two different decisions and treating them as one causes a lot of unnecessary regret.

Some courses lead to one profession and effectively nowhere else. Others open a wide range. Neither is better, but you should know which kind you are choosing, because a narrow course is a bet on a single outcome and a broad one defers the decision at the cost of a clear route.

	Narrow, vocational	Broad, general
Route to work	Direct and well defined	Requires you to build one
If you change your mind	Expensive, sometimes a restart	Comparatively cheap
Suits you when	You are confident and have tested it	You are capable but genuinely unsure
Main risk	Committing to a guess	Drifting without direction

If you are certain, narrow is efficient. If you are choosing a profession mainly because you have heard of it, broad buys you time to find out at a much lower cost than switching later.

Read the actual module list

You will spend years doing the modules, not the course title, and the two can be surprisingly different.

Find the programme structure on the institution’s site and read every module for every year. Then ask yourself honestly which of them you would be glad to sit in, and how many you would dread.

Two things surprise people here. Courses with the same name at different institutions can have quite different content and emphasis. And a course you dismissed on its title sometimes contains most of what you actually wanted.

Look especially at the early years. Many programmes front load foundational material that is heavier in mathematics, or in writing, than the title suggests, and that is where people discover they chose badly.

Be honest about what you are good at

Interest and aptitude are not the same thing, and they pull in different directions more often than career advice admits.

Wanting a subject is not the same as being able to sustain it for four years while being assessed on it. That is not a reason to abandon an interest, and it is a reason to be clear eyed. A course built on mathematics will be built on mathematics every year, not only in the first.

Useful test: look at your last two years of results and ask which subjects you did well in without it feeling like the hardest thing you did. That intersection, things you are drawn to and things that come to you reasonably, is where people tend to do best.

Three bad reasons that account for most regret

Because it is prestigious. Prestige is other people’s opinion and you are the one attending the lectures. Students admitted to competitive courses they did not want are among the least happy people on any campus.

Because a parent decided. This is difficult and often loving, and it deserves a real conversation rather than either silent compliance or a confrontation. Come with evidence: the module list, what the work actually involves, what it leads to. Parents are usually arguing for security, and showing them a secure route you would actually complete is more persuasive than saying you do not want theirs.

Because friends chose it. They will not be in your seminars for long, and you will still be on the course.

Money, honestly

Earnings matter and pretending otherwise is unhelpful when families are stretched. Two cautions about how people use the information.

Figures quoted for a profession are usually for the established version of it, years in, and often in a different country. Starting positions look different, and the gap between entry and established can be long.

And earnings vary more within a field than between fields. A capable person in a modestly paid profession frequently out earns a struggling one in a lucrative profession. Choosing a field you will be good at is not the opposite of choosing for money.

Look at where the work actually is, too. A qualification with few local employers means moving, and that is a real cost worth deciding on deliberately.

Test the choice before you commit to it

You can gather a surprising amount of evidence before applying, and almost nobody does. Each of these costs little and tells you something a prospectus cannot.

• Read an introductory textbook for the subject, or the first few chapters. If the way the field thinks does not interest you across fifty pages, four years will be long.
• Find a syllabus for a first year module and try some of the exercises. This is the most honest test available, because it is the actual work.
• Watch or attend a lecture if any are open or published. You are checking whether the material engages you when it is not being sold to you.
• Spend a day with someone doing the job, if you can arrange it. Even a few hours of observation changes an abstraction into something concrete.
• Read job advertisements in the field. They tell you what employers actually ask for, which is often different from what the course emphasises.

That last one is quietly the most useful and the least used. Advertisements are written by people who need the work done, so they describe the real requirements without any of the marketing.

Where the work is, not only what it is

A qualification is only useful where someone wants it, and that varies enormously by field and by place.

Ask two questions about any course. Are there employers for this near where I want to live, and does this qualification travel if I need to move? Some are recognised widely across borders, others are tied closely to one country’s professional regulation and do not transfer without further examination.

If a field requires professional registration to practise, find out early what that involves, how long it takes after graduation, and whether the course you are considering actually leads to it. A degree in a regulated field that does not satisfy the registration route is a serious and avoidable problem.

Questions students ask

What if I genuinely do not know what I want?

Common, and not a problem to be solved before applying. Choose broad, choose something you can do well, and treat the first year as information gathering. Most people discover direction by encountering things, not by deciding in advance.

Can I change course later?

Often, especially early and within a related area, though rules vary and later changes cost more. Ask the department what transfers are actually possible before assuming either that you are trapped or that switching will be easy.

Does the institution matter more than the course?

For most fields the course and your own record matter more. For a few, professional networks attached to particular institutions matter a great deal. Ask people already working in the field, since this varies by profession and by country.

What if I do not get my first choice?

There are usually more routes to the same destination than the first one you found. See what to do if you miss the cut off.

Two things to do this week

Read the full module list for the course you are most drawn to, every year of it, and mark the ones you would be glad to study. If most of them leave you cold, you have learned something important cheaply.

Then find one person doing the job and ask them what they did yesterday, hour by hour. Between those two things you will know more than almost anyone else making this decision.

More on admissions in Universities and Admissions, and on funding it in Scholarships and Funding.