Many people have preconceptions about Geography students; that we do no work, it’s a doss and that crayons form a major part of our actual diet. On top of this, other students consider the subject to be boring… admittedly, there are some boring aspects, for instance learning about soils and sand or about Fordism. However there are some definite perks when you study Geography!
A day out in some subjects normally refers to leaving your lab or letting your dirty spots dry out in the rare Southampton Sun, whilst walking between buildings in your 1 hour break in your busy schedule of 9-6 lectures. Well, Geographers take this to a whole new level. It’s compulsory to take a field trip in your second year. BA students get the choice between Paris and Amsterdam (I think it’s pretty obvious which city I chose!).
We were ‘forced’ to experience the city – bet you’re jealous now. With this, the work which was carried out was actually enjoyed by all that it felt like a holiday! But wait, there’s more! BSc students have the choice between Tenerife and Picos (Spain, for those that have no geographical knowledge). Being forced to sit around a pool and top up your tan so that you don’t fail your degree is definitely a plus. You can even take an optional module in your third year to do it all again!
Studying Geography also permits you to become a member of the massively popular GeogSoc. Not only do they organise some of the most talked about socials, but they hold 2 massive balls a year. The Christmas ball is a black tie affair, with a 3 course meal and other attractions, being a member means you save a lot of money on the ticket. On top of this ball comes the highly enjoyable Summer Boat Ball, again black tie and including drinks and an entertaining cruise on one of Southampton’s finest vessels around the Solent. This just shows that Geographers, not only study hard but party harder!
Anyone for model making?
For those that care, mainly because you’re on a course consisting of all guys and the odd girl, that you’re not sure if they’re just a long haired Metallica fan, geography consists of about 65% girls. Go on, come into a lecture and check!
Living up to the cliché, geographers do also get set assignments which require the odd colouring pencil. These are obviously key life skills that will be needed in later life, so why not be assessed on them now? Some modules require you to make a poster, which is not just informative but colourful.
Oh no, these are not just restricted to first years. Second years often have to replicate this task whilst also making a scrap book about their own homes. There you are thinking how dull, but oh wait, in third year you get to make a model village! Even I am surprised at this. As I was walking around the Geography building, I found a number of model villages, I thought they’d had a school in or something, until I realised the poster above it named a third year module. Check the picture out for yourself; I think I know what modules I’ll be choosing for next year!
These are just a few perks behind being a Geography student!
For a rebuttal, click here
Southampton students perform on stage on BBC 2
Preview: Broken Arrow Productions present ‘A Doll’s House’
Review: SUSU Theatre Group presents ‘The Knight Who Smells Of Sunflowers’
Review: Comedy Soc: ‘One Million Years B.C’
Review: SUSU Theatre Group’s ‘POSH’
Is it worth mentioning that GeogSoc are a bunch of massive sluts? #perks
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brb facebooking when the next geogsoc social is…
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Or you could a proper degree and go on holiday in the summer…
Also lol at ‘famous’ geogsoc. How optimistic.
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Would that be a proper degree where they teach you grammar? Ref Keeping It Real “Or you could a proper degree…” I think there is a word missing there
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Missing a word isn’t counted as ‘grammar’. Nice try though. You must be a geography student – talking about useless shit nobody cares about.
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seriously did the wrong degree…
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Lol. I wonder if geo students realise that they can go on holidays without having to do a degree where it’s not compulsory to do so (either way, employment prospects are the same).
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Everyone I have known who has done Geography has had to do a conversion course to get a real job.
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Might help if your response made sense. Geographers are one of the most employable graduates because we actually have social skills
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Social skills? What being sluts as is so proudly proclaimed? Ooook.
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I’m sorry but you have absolutely no idea who people are, how dare you even thinks about saying things like that about strangers. You are just being an Internet troll and need to get on with your own life.
Thanks
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Really Nancy… seems there is a wealth of evidence against you.
“The dynamism of a geography degree is sought-after by employers. In fact, a 2010 poll of over 200,000 graduates from UK universities found that those with geography degrees had the lowest rate of unemployment six months after graduation of any discipline polled, bar none (Higher Education Career Services Unit). This is especially true at Southampton, which is consistently a top performer amongst leading geography programs on employability.”
http://www.southampton.ac.uk/geography/undergraduate/careers.page
Also see here http://careers.guardian.co.uk/careers-blog/experts-view-why-are-certain-grads-less-likely-to-be-unemployed
here
http://www.rgs.org/GeographyToday/Geography+in+the+UK.htm
and here
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/a-world-of-opportunity-2148648.html
And LeAVEITYEH, we prefer to call it “networking”
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Well done on making your degree sound even more pointless than people already assume. All in the name of banter I guess?
Also, I’m pretty certain the only people who think GeogSoc are ‘massively famous’ are the committee members themselves.
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Is it possible to include any more exclamation marks in this article?
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HAHAHAHAHAHA brilliant
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Hahaaa geogsoc – famous, maybe, but for being the most stupid degree at Southampton. Nice try!!
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LOL. So true. We don’t want to work you too hard!
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What an actual joke! This article has completely degraded Geography as a subject. But at the end of the day I’d like to see all you haters try and do it, some of us actually do work hard! If you can sit at a computer and hate on everyone else your degree clearly isnt that challenging! Get on with you own life please. #moreimportantthingsintheworld
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I did Geography and now have a job that most Law students would give their right nut (or ovary) to have.
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The point being you had to do a GDL to get it. Why not just do law to start with and save yourself the cost and time of the GDL? Why didn’t you just get a job involving geog? Oh yeah..because geography is shit…
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Incorrect, I was recruited with just my degree in geography and I am currently doing ILEX which is costing me nothing as the company is paying for the resource, and it is not a waste of time as I am being paid a generous salary for doing so. I chose Geography as I wasn’t 100% sure what I wanted to pursue as a career, I enjoyed Grography and it is a gateway course, you can tailor the degree how you like it but it is by no means a doss. If you want it to be easy and scrape through then you definitely can but in order to succeed then you need to put it the work. The degree is what you make it. I don’t regret choosing Geography one bit, I found it very interesting, rewarding and has given me a great start into the working world.
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So you’re taking a conversion course to become a paralegal…
Congratulations are in order, I suppose.
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Please correct me if I’m wrong, but most law degrees don’t qualify you to practice law either. You still need to do a years legal practice course…which you have to pay your way through unless you get sponsored by a firm…so doing a law degree saves you no time or money…
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Well you are wrong…it saves you the cost of the conversion, and also the year you would spend doing it. So actually yes, you save about 10k unless you’re sponsored and you also save a year of your life.
So legal practice courses, which i know many people who have had to do following a law degree, are a myth are they? It may not be a conversion course but you still have to do the extra year, paid by you or your sponsor, to become able to practice
If you want to practice law with a degree from another discipline then you need to do the conversion course AND then the LPC.
So a three year law degree + LPC… OR
A three year irrelevant degree + GDL + LPC
To get sponsored to do the GDL is very difficult, no one banks on getting that.
To all the haters: at least by studying Geography you actually get to learn about real life, things that are interesting and may come in handy when talking to people outside of your degree. On the other hand you have Maths and Science which, unless you probably end up working as a scientist or mathematician, are never likely to use many of the skills you have learnt. You don’t need a maths degree to work in a bank. How anyone can enjoy working out equations…. It’s boring, and don’t say it isn’t, it is.
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On the other hand you have maths and science?? Or you know, law, history, english, things which are actually a lot more interesting and relevant than geography maths or science. ‘When talking to people outside of your degree’ that is. Not to generalise but geography students have been the most boring people I’ve met at this uni..nobody cares about rocks…
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At the end of the day that’s your opinion that its boring I absolutely love it as I’m sure the other 200 people in my year do and I find the subjects you suggest boring. Like has already been said geography has one of the highest employability rates. I think you’ll find that geography, history as you suggested, and psychology offer the best employability skills around! So maybe you should not generalise your own personal opinion to thousands of students across the country. You have no idea what each individual person is like and should just stop being so narrow minded.
Thanks
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rocks be geology
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‘Not to generalise but geography students have been the most boring people I’ve met at this uni’
Not to generalise but people who put ‘not to generalise’ in front of a generalisation are, generally, idiots.
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Of course you use the maths you learnt from a maths degree in a graduate job. The maths you do at Uni is far broader than the maths you’d do at A level, it’s not all pure but the pure maths is the basis for all of science, computing and engineering: you can branch out into acturial science, logistics, operational research and computer programming all of which require a strong mathematical backbone. Maths grads are decision makers and problem solvers; they’re talk how to think logically and find flaws in work (which is where you are taught the theoritical calculus and proofs). Geography on the other hand has minimal contact hours and does not demand the academic rigour of STEM subjects. For environmental related careers it’s the STEM subjects which are the most useful. The maths grads who go onto acturial science and statisticans to look at the demographics; the civil engineers who build the coastal defences, model the water and waste systems; the geologists and scientists who measure different aspects of ecosystems (such as water phd and ecodiversity)….The problem about geography is that they try to do everything but do nothing. They do simple maths, simple biology, simple physics/geophysics, simple stats…..
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Ok, but I’m not actually talking about environmental geography. Physical geography is more aligned with Geology which is something I am not at all interested in. I’m referring to Human Geography. In Human Geograhy we don’t do simple maths, biology etc, we are interested in people, places, and society at large. We learn how the human world works. The set of skills that we acquire are just as, if not more, important than what you learn in Maths. I agree, you obviously learn some complicated material, but the writing, presenting and evaluative skills most of you will lack is terminal. In know many clever maths students, but give them a document to produce and they’ll be looking for the nearest exit.
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I’m sorry but as soon as you start saying your degree is worth more than someone else’s in terms of ‘skills’ gained then you can jog on.
I’m a Chemist, I’ll think you’ll find I’ve probably gained as many skills as you have that are equally as ‘important’ in the job sector I’ll be going into as yours are for your job sector. Stop stereotyping every other degree and maybe people will stop thinking Geography is just colouring. I don’t mix chemicals together in a freaking beaker just to see what goes bang, just like physicists don’t just smash things together to see what they’re made of and mathematicians aren’t all socially inept geeks that sit around fapping over numbers.
Well done you know how to ‘produce a document’, I’m sure if you were asked to come up with an equation for the spread of an epidemic you’d be equally flummoxed and also head to the nearest exit.
PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT AND ARE GOOD AT DIFFERENT THINGS STOP BITCHING ABOUT IT.
(and yes caps were needed there.)
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I wouldn’t listen too much into this article though, you make what you want from your degree.
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If it’s easy enough to “undermine your degree” just by publishing a jokey article with a loacl student news outlet, it’s obviously not that big a deal.
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My house mates study geography and it is definitely not easy like this article suggests! They went to Tenerife last week and it was hardly a holiday sitting around a pool- it involved nine hour hikes up a volcano every day, late night lectures and assessed presentations.
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They should have chosen Picos! That included: 3 hour hikes, a cable car ride, heavy drinking from 3pm, and a small presentation task completed in a few hours. as someone said earlier, Geography is as easy or difficult as you make it for yourself.
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nine hour hikes up a volcano? jesus if it takes nine hours to get up and nine hours to get back id just stay at the top!
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Go outside? No thanks, I will just stay in my fapcave.
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Wannabe BNOC spouting absolute **** about a degree he obviously hasn’t quite grasped yet. Terrible advert for the department, excellent advert for his own stupidity!
Possibly more of a “Whatsoc” page than an accurate depiction of geography, consider the “preconceptions” met!
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Just wow… oh dear… Whilst I can’t speak about human geography as I only studied it in first year, I’d argue that physical geography isn’t a complete doss, despite what this article suggests.
For anyone worrying upon reading this that their geography degree is a waste of time, many of my geography graduate friends are now employed in decent geography-related jobs… then again, maybe their CV read a bit better than this author’s is going to…
In addition, this seems to have been written by a second year, to whom I can only wish luck for completing a dissertation at the same time as all the other modules… there’s a fun year ahead.
PS – I was not informed of a pool in Picos… good luck swimming in the tiny fish pond!
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Well the 30 page document that maths students have to produce in their third year must have been a massive surprise to them… Having said that I don’t think Geography is a bad degree at all, it allows students to learn lots of varied skills.
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i have no problem with geog students, except when they have a geogsoc night at the start of each year because they book out sobar or jesters for geogsoc plus 400. and the rest of us get to sit and watch them stroll in for 3 hours
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this bought back memories i thought I had erased
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GeogSoc: “they hold 2 massive balls a year”. Just so y’all know.
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Can I just point out that a year abroad is better than a field trip. A week in Tenerife? Do a YA and you can go almost anywhere in the world. A lot of degrees offer it, and if you do languages it is compulsory and you get thousands of pounds worth of grant. Languages are actually interesting, useful and give you excellent social skills. So geographers, suck on that one when you realise you could have been on a Mexican or Spanish beach all year, or skiing in the alps etc.
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I’m a Geography student and I found this article both immaturely written and degrading to myself, lecturers and the subject as a whole.
I’m very surprised this was even published.
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