Does the university do enough to prepare you for life after uni?

Flickr/ Foreign and Commonwealth Office

YES
Dan Cope

I flinch when someone says that ‘English Literature isn’t a proper degree’. Shut up. You are wrong. I’m quite defensive when it comes to my choices in life. The reason the UCAS system is so long and arduous is because you are making probably the biggest decision of your life. So I like to believe that the time I spent considering my choice of degree and place of study was beneficial. I think it was.

For first-year English Literature students, the department here at Warwick offers three core modules which cover a broad range of literature from antiquity up until the late 20th century. I’ll be the first one to admit that I don’t really picture myself requiring the skills of translating Medieval English in my future career but the diversity is welcome all the same. I was recently speaking to a family member who has just finished their degree elsewhere and she confessed she felt like she hadn’t studied half the classics I have in my first year at Warwick.

I suppose I am quite lucky in the sense that I want to teach English, so some of the more obscure texts I have encountered at Warwick, will further my literary arsenal nonetheless. Personal aspirations aside, the seminars I attend are (mostly) challenging and stimulating enough to inspire cultural and theoretical debate.

Issues in texts such as modernity, racial representation and gender politics aren’t unfathomable concepts that are reserved for scholarly sentiment alone. These issues are pertinent to everyday life. As an example, the exposure to such critical debates has changed how I might respond to the ethics of the presentation of the daily news.

The whole idea of being ‘prepared for life after the degree’ seems something of a moot concept anyway. Post-student life: the nagging fears of having to get a mortgage or working full-time and the sense of spiritual emptiness that comes with it … Okay, I’m being cynical but my point is that how could anyone ever be prepared for that?

No my degree here does not make all this future hullaballoo any clearer for me but I’m not sure it could even if it wanted to. I’m put through my paces here and I now know what I want to do in life. So for the moment I’m feeling pretty content with degree life at Warwick. To futurity.

Flickr/ Steve Rhodes

NO
Anonymous

At Warwick University, there are plenty of ways you can prepare for graduation. You can join societies: get experience organizing events, receive training on skills such as first aid and get a taste of, for example, what the third sector is like. You can focus on your degree, learning presentation skills and gaining self-confidence. You can read the bizarre ‘MyAdvantage’ emails that pop into your inbox seemingly randomly at one or two AM and find your dream job amongst their listings.

One of these is not like the others. One of these is designed by the university to help people get into graduate jobs. One of them is ignored by every student I’ve spoken to. I’ll leave it to you to guess which one.

The Students’ Union (SU), through societies, the training and literal jobs they offer, do far more to prepare us for the “big bad world” of employment than the university. The SU is far more accessible, far less daunting and far more obvious. The SU is meant to be here for us as students, whereas the University is meant to give us the, and here’s the buzzword of the century kids, “transferable skills” that will get us employed. So why is that, despite its existence, no-one uses the university’s career service?

It could be the title: ‘MyAdvantage’, or the fact that they cause my phone to buzz randomly throughout the night with the same undesirable job offers on a weekly basis. It could be that they’re based in University House, which is just that little bit too far from campus. Or it could be general ignorance: it is possible that people, including me, don’t realize how good their services are.

I hope it’s the latter. But regardless of the reason, it should be worked on. We might be one of the most desirable universities for employers as of this year, but if we’re not confident as individuals that our own university is behind us, then the group statistics are surely going to fall away.