‘I’ll have a bit of both, please’: when students can’t choose between subjects

Sixty-five years ago, in a University of Cambridge lecture called “Two Cultures”, the writer and scientist C. P. Snow bemoaned the fact that students saw themselves either as scientists or as following a humanities path. He despaired that “There seems…to be no place where the cultures meet.”

When I was at school studying A levels, it was taken for granted that the boys would choose mathematics and science subjects while the girls would go down the arts and humanities route. Roll forward a few (well, a lot of) years, and this is still a hard nut to crack: I work in an IB school where very few girls choose higher-level physics and only rarely do boys choose higher-level art and design.

I have a personal interest in this because my degree was in astrophysics, and via a very convoluted path (a good example of a squiggly career), I became an art teacher. So I am keen for my students to explore university courses that allow them to have feet in many camps (none of my students has more than two feet, but I wanted to use an idiom that covered more disciplines than the binary arts-science divide), so that they have more flexibility in their career choices.

Choosing a degree subject: pick and mix

Counsellors who also work with younger students on careers, or those who collaborate closely with their school’s careers counsellors, will be aware of the growing focus on skills rather than knowledge. Thinking about how to develop their skills encourages students to look beyond degree courses that might traditionally have led directly into a job for life.

At an early stage in the school careers and university counselling journey, it is important to encourage our students to reflect on their own strengths and personal qualities, and to factor these into planning. To use the buffet analogy, if they want to have ice cream and a cinnamon roll with their fried egg for a hotel breakfast, why not?

Cherry-picking

There are, of course, many routes for students who don’t want to commit to a particular subject until they have had time to consider options in more depth: the US system, joint honours or combined degrees, or a degree in liberal arts and sciences (such as the one offered by Leiden University), for example.

Australian universities offer a wide range of double degrees – options at Monash University, for example, include arts and health sciences, engineering and art, and law and engineering. All of these offer flexibility and keep multiple doors open.

The main course

Another option is to look at degree courses that combine a range of disciplines. Here is a selection, some more obvious than others:

Anthropology: social sciences, languages, humanities. Can be studied as a BA or BSc

Archaeology: science, social science and humanities

Architecture: art and design, maths, science

Art conservation: science, art and design. (Although usually studied as a postgraduate specialism, there are some undergraduate courses such as those at the University of Delaware or Marist Italy.)

Advertising: business, art and design, social sciences

Media: business, IT, humanities, languages, art and design

Music technology: music, science, IT

Philosophy, psychology and economics: what it says on the tin

Product design: art and design, science

Psychology: either joint honours degrees (with a range of subjects that includes languages, business, neuroscience, religion or sports science) or applied psychology courses, such as psychology of fashion at University of the Arts London

A recipe for success

Rather than use counselling sessions to talk at students, counsellors may find that getting students involved in thinking about these crossover courses through games has more impact. I use a Venn diagram (see below) and a list of 20 courses, and ask students to decide where in the diagram each course should be placed.

This works well as a competition, with students in small teams. I then ask each team to choose one of the courses and prepare a presentation on it, with examples from a range of universities.

This gets the students actively involved in the research process. And I find that they much prefer to learn about different universities and systems from their peers than from me (in the same way that they like to try recipes they see on TikTok rather than from traditional recipe books).

An amuse-bouche

To stimulate your students’ appetites for exploring areas where science and art meet, you could introduce them to PST Art: Art and Science Collide. This is a collaboration between Californian art galleries and the Getty Foundation.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has some good resources for teachers and students, too.

Today’s specials

Of course, many students have pretty clear ideas about which subjects they enjoy or which subjects are a route to chosen careers. Others recognise that they are strong in a particular area: they neither want nor need to consider a multidisciplinary route.

Often, parents have concerns about degrees that don’t seem to have a clear focus on employment, and here the university websites with alumni case histories can be useful and reassuring.

Ensuring that our students are aware of all the dishes on the menu is, I believe, an important part of a counsellor’s role.