Education / University

Deciding Your Entire Future At 17 | My Change of Plan

Busy with Izzy6 Comments

This time last year I was 100% certain that I wanted to be a primary school teacher, now I just don’t know any more…

I knew that I wanted to teach and be a positive difference on young people from around the age of 14. I didn’t particularly enjoy secondary school and I just wanted to go back to the easy, fun and exciting primary school days. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to be a primary school teacher. I wrote my personal statement over the summer, went to the uni open days for my course and I was still really keen and certain that this was the direction that I wanted to head in.

However, recently I’ve been thinking. Is that really want I want to do? I have been babysitting since I was 14 and I am volunteering every week at a local primary school; yes I enjoy it, but I just don’t know if I can see a future in this career. I thoroughly enjoy working with children and being a influential role model but I don’t know if it’s what I want to do any more.

From my first Sociology lesson at A Level I loved it and I particularly enjoyed the education section at AS. This got me thinking. What if instead of doing a degree in Primary Education I did a combined honours in Education Studies and Sociology? I did my research and the courses sounded amazing! They seemed so much more interesting and I wanted to start a course asap.

But I keep thinking that it’s too late to change my mine, even though nothing needs to be in until January but being the organised, scheduled person that I am, I don’t like to change my mind last minute as this causes me to panic about the stupidest things.

Anyway, I’ll keep you updated with what I end up doing (I changed my mind about doing a gap year, I know typical me but I’m going to do a more detailed post about that later) and please let me know if you have any advice. Should I do a Primary Education degree because I’ve wanted to be a teacher for a long time? Or should I do a joint Education/Sociology degree because I can always do a PGCE afterwards and if I’m not 100% committed will I put all of the work in? Or should I wait a year to apply so that my gap year will help me make a decision about what I want to do? Help!!

6 thoughts on “Deciding Your Entire Future At 17 | My Change of Plan”

  1. Hope you don’t mind me commenting!
    I would say if you genuinely think you would enjoy the combined degree more than just education then go for that, even if it is a last minute change.
    I did the same thing – I knew I wanted to do German and Spanish and started going to open days for those subjects. Then at one open day I went to a sample lecture on linguistics and loved it so much that I decided I wanted that to be part of my degree too. That meant I had to completely change the universities I was considering as a course that combined all three of German, Spanish and Linguistics was pretty rare. Anyway it’s definitely worth it if you think you’ll enjoy it more because you’ll get more out of it, and yes maybe the ‘point’ of going to uni is to get a degree to then get a good job but you should enjoy it too!
    Also the change you’re suggesting isn’t drastic – it’s not like you’re switching between art and aeronautical engineering, so it’s a reasonable thing to do.
    And finally, in the first weeks unis are pretty good at letting you switch course – I knew someone who got accepted for History and English but then swapped to History and Philosophy in the first week of first year. And even more surprising, a girl I know did her entire first year of German, French and Spanish and swapped in second year to German and philosophy!
    Sorry for the length of this comment but basically what I’m saying is it’s definitely not too late to change if you really think it’s the best option 🙂

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    • Thank you. Your comment was really useful! I haven’t put in my UCAS application yet as I’m still undecided (and it doesn’t need to be in until January) but I don’t know whether I could cope with the amount of individual reading that you have to do for a more academic course. I’d prefer a more vocational course, like Primary Education, where there is built in placements so it wouldn’t just be lecture after lecture. I don’t know though as Education Studies and Sociology does sound really interesting.

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      • Ah I see, fair enough! It might be worth looking into the contact hours you have per week? Because even if there is more reading then often there’s a lot of time to do it 🙂 for example in my first 2 years at uni I had 11 hours ish per week (and actually those ‘hours’ were only 45 mins) so there was plenty of time to do the reading 🙂 also not sure if this will make a difference to your thoughts so far but the chances are you’ll have more seminars than lectures which are more interesting! I had just 3 lectures a week and the remaining 8 hours were seminars. Obviously this will vary with courses (I have no idea about sociology!!) but worth bearing in mind!
        The best bet is to do as much research as possible into the course at the unis you’re considering then hopefully you’ll get a better idea of the workload 🙂 good luck!!

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      • Thank you 🙂 Your advice has been really useful and I’ll make sure I’ve done as much research as I can before I apply for anything. Thank you again!

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