Mickey Mouse degree? Think again!

That’s a popular phrase being thrown around these days. Often mixed in with grumbles of, “too many kids going to university” and, “it wasn’t like this in my day, in my day you had to be clever to go to university!”, so many degrees are being called “Mickey Mouse”. Now then, if there was a Disney studies course, not only would I be the first one to sign up, but I’d also refer to it as a Mickey Mouse degree – not because it’s “easy”, but because it’s about Mickey Mouse. I’ve never studied Disney in Drama A Level, and I don’t think we will at degree level either, so I’m not sure where this idea of a “Mickey Mouse degree” has come from.

Of course, I know that people are referring to the idea that the course is easy – minimal contact hours, very little independent study required and very easy to get a degree. It’s usually used by the STEM students – the ones doing sciences, technologies, maths or engineering. A theme I’ve noticed in a few of these – but not all, because I’m living in a flat with three STEM students and they’re incredibly nice guys, all of them – is that they have this idea that they’re better than others – namely BA students. They have this idea that all we do is draw or prance around in leotards or write stories for a couple of hours, a few times a week, and then we get long weekends and nice lie-ins and very little independent study.

Here’s two samples of timetables.

Timetable 1

Monday – 10-1, Tuesday – 9-1, Wednesday – 9-1, Thursday – 9-12, Friday – 9-1

Timetable 2

Monday – 11-5, Tuesday – 9-5, Wednesday – 9-5, Thursday – 9-5, Friday – 11-4. 

 

So the first timetable looks pretty good, doesn’t it? And you sit there thinking “Wow, that must be an easy degree – that’s got to be the theatre one”. Actually, apparently that is the timetable for first year Maths at UCL. The second one is my timetable for Theatre, Television and Performance at Glyndwr University, which has been described as a Mickey Mouse course and a Mickey Mouse university by some people. However, it doesn’t just end there –  as well as independent study, writing essays and having to do all the reading, we also have rehearsals. We’re doing shows, we’re doing community projects, we’re putting our social lives on hold and sacrificing doing things we want to do, because that’s the only way we can get a good grade and earn a good degree. I’m not saying Maths is easy – I know I’d never be able to do it – but I often wonder if these STEM students, and anyone else who looks down their nose at the course I’m studying and others like it, would be able to do what we have to do – to spend all day rehearsing when you’re tired, busy, possibly slightly hungover. To get up onstage and perform to huge audiences, or to tiny, intimate groups of four or five.

You can learn how to do maths – yes, some have a natural aptitude, but you can learn how to balance equations and find ratios. You can’t be taught how to act – you can be given techniques and taught how to use them, but you need to have a fairly substantial natural talent for it first. So, before you see someone studying drama, or performance, or music, or media, or creative writing, and you scoff – “they don’t really need to put in any effort” -, think again. You could be on your way home after a day of work in the office, or back to your flat after a 2 hour statistics lecture – they’re having a five minute drink break in the middle of a gruelling 6 hour rehearsal where they’re being pushed to the very limit, or they’re working to an incredibly tight deadline to try and force the last few pages of a story, or an article, or a composition onto the paper.

Who really has the easy ride?

There may be trouble ahead…

Sorry for the cheesy title – but the song seems to be quite apt at the minute. I’m trying to keep hopeful, and tell myself that there’s nothing I can do and I need to wait and see what happens – but it’s looking more hopeless by the minute, and I’m going to have to make some tough decisions pretty soon.

I want to be a midwife. I know I want to be a midwife, and it’d be a shame if I never get to be a midwife because it is a career that really interests me – but I don’t know if I come across as passionate enough about it to get in. And that’s if I even GET to an interview – at the moment, it looks like they only want people with work experience (living where I live, that isn’t easy), and all the courses for 2012 entry are closed. So, right now it looks like if I want to do Midwifery, it’s going to be a gap year for me – I can’t see myself being taken on for Midwifery in Clearing, and although people keep telling me to keep hoping, I need to be realistic now – hope is all well and good, but it’s not going to get me a university place. Let’s look at the facts – I have a personal statement completely geared towards doing Drama, I have no work experience in Midwifery and no-one had any idea I even had an interest in it until last month. In Clearing, I’ll be up against people with midwifery-geared personal statements AND work experience – they just didn’t get past the interviews for their first choices. Being realistic here, I really don’t stand a chance.

I’m trying not to let it get to me – I hate moaning, although I seem to do a lot of it – and I’m determined not to let it spoil the next few months, but it’s so hard. I’m getting so confused – being bombarded with stuff about University and seeing these kids on TheStudentRoom who’ve had their whole lives planned out for ages and have every chance of achieving that and having a simple, smooth application process, getting into Oxbridge and not sitting up, wide awake because they can’t sleep knowing that they need to make a decision. And then I have people telling me to keep hoping and relax, but I can’t! I don’t want to keep hoping until the morning of results day, when I wake up (if I even get to sleep) and realizing that when all these people are looking forwards to going to university, I have nowhere to go – if I take a gap year, the most productive thing that will come of it will be getting to tenth prestige on Call Of Duty because there’s a pathway to nursing course taking place nearby, but I really don’t like the sound of it. There’s no jobs available and basically, nothing I can do. I need to go to university this year, otherwise my only other option is go back to college, and there’s no way I’m going back to that hell hole. It’s a struggle to keep going in day after day at the moment!

I’m really at a loss as to what to do. I had two offers and three interviews for drama-related courses which I applied for in a rush because I knew if I put it off I’d keep changing my mind (I guess that’s the definition of irony), and I declined them all and now I’m stuck in a rut. Why didn’t I leave things as they were? Yes, I probably wouldn’t have been thrilled with my course, BUT I’D BE ABLE TO SLEEP RIGHT NOW!

The temptation is there to just jump at the first course I see in Extra/Clearing that looks as though it might interest me and spend a year doing that until I can sort out what I want to do next – but then I have to work out finances and applying all over again and the same thing might happen and there’s so many things that could go wrong.

All I want to do is hide in a corner and let other people make my decisions for me. I’m 17, and what I choose to do now will have an impact on my future, both in the short term and the long term – I don’t feel old enough for these decisions!