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?
the life of a moomin 