University Questions Options

[CommieBastard]

I'm going to university in October, and I think a couple other Matazonians are too. So, if I may, I'd like to draw on the wisdom of the British 'Zonians who are at or have been to university here.

First question: how easy is it to take individual modules that aren't a part of your course? I'm doing Philosophy; say I wanted to learn Mandarin in my free time. Could I?

[porcelainwarrior]

Not sure how the England uni's work but I'm studying in Edinburgh and we have quite a bit of choice...here's how it works...

First Year - your degree subject (Psychology 1 in my case) plus two other random subjects at first year level of your choice (I'm taking Linguistics 1 and East Asian Civilisation 1).

Second Year - your degree subject (Psychology 2) plus one other subject from first year (Linguistics 2 hopefully) and a totally new subject (Social Anthropology 1 perhaps).

Third and Fourth Year - your degree subject only (Psychology 3 and 4)

Note - I've taken all full year courses but you can also take half courses which only last one semester each.

da-dum!

Be careful though, a lot of places require you to do two half courses (Logic and Science of Philosophy I believe) if you're taking Philosophy as your degree subject so you'll only actually be able to choose one outside course (or two half courses).

PS - This set-up is used in Dundee as well as far as I can tell, other than that I don't know which uni's have this policy, which are more restrictive, etc, etc.