As seen in university toilets the world over.
Elizabeth Brauders | Staff writer
On my first day of university, an English lecturer opened with a joke about how silly we were for choosing to study arts degrees in the midst of a recession. From that moment on I became painfully aware of how useless the rest of the world perceived my study path to be. Constant jokes abounded as did casual comments from my mother and relatives about some neighbour’s son who’d switched from Arts to Engineering and was now making a million euros an hour to have wild and exotic job prospects thrown at him. A recent thread on Reddit.com on advice for the younger generation showed one of top pieces of advice to be “don’t study arts”. Forbes backs up this view by listing almost all of Trinity’s TSM options in the Top Ten Least Valuable College Majors. Yet the TSM office released figures for 2011 graduates that show 87% to be either employed, or in further education. Whenever I hopefully bring up these statistics people scoff that those jobs are probably in coffee shops and that further study is a conversion course to something more employable.
In spite of all of this, last year 15,698 CAO applicants listed an Arts or Social Science course as their first preference, that’s just over 25% of the total number of applicants, an increase on 2004’s figures of 22.5%. Given Irish students’ continued interest in these areas, I spoke to some graduates to document their experiences and advice for the next generation. Kate Keehan graduated in July 2012 with a degree in Comparative Literature and English and American
Literature from the University of Kent. She chose her course in 2009, and despite recessionary panic, she explains, “I couldn’t bring myself to choose a course that I knew I wouldn’t enjoy. We obviously heard a lot from other disciplines about literature and history degrees being ‘useless’ but the education we receive from these degrees is actually quite broad. We are marketable for career paths from admin to marketing and public relations.” Kate’s conviction that “If you work hard enough and get your name out there during your time at college, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do well” paid off and she is now working at RD Marketing and Media, a publishing house of magazines including The Definitive Guide to Going to College and The Definitive Guide to Your Perfect Wedding, of which she is chief editor.
Ciaran Lucas began his third-level studies in Ballyfermot College of Further Education, before heading to the University of Dundee to round his studies in Animation and Electronic media up to a degree level. When asked what areas he has since worked in he exclaims, “Wow, everything fun. I’ve had various roles in Film, TV, Comics, Games, Illustration and a bit of graphic design.” He admits that as a freelance artist “any ‘days off’ are spent with a niggling sense of guilt that you should be working, and there’s a constant hum of insecurity over where your next pay cheque is coming from. “That said, in the past week I’ve had to design spaceships and create characters, with as much tea at my disposal as I deign suitable, 90% of the time I love what I’m doing, but the trade off in most cases is that you’re working 90% of the time. ”
The reason many students choose Arts is that guidance counsellors have encouraged them to pick a course that they know they’ll enjoy, but is our happiness linked to our job satisfaction? Ciaran thinks so; “Related to, but not dictated by… Work is never easy- the clue’s in the name. But if you believe in the goal then the hours are more bearable, the deadlines become challenges.” His opinion relates closely to Kate’s, whose advice for prospective students is that “Choosing something you enjoy means you’ll stress out less, meet people that you have lots in common with and work will feel a little less like work.”
