Choosing my course

Date: around ?/09/2002

I singled in on economics and maths combining two of my favourite subjects

Now I had an idea of what universities I might want to go to from the Decide what I want to study page I could have another think about the course I wanted to take. I originally had a list of 15 maths, economics, finance and business courses but on the Look at some university websites and prospectuses page I saw that not all the universities offered all of the courses. In fact, Oxford only offered Economics and management, so if I went to Oxford I would have to do that.

Scanning down the list of these courses offered at the universities I was interested in I produced this list of popular ones (some similar courses have been compressed into a single category:

Economics (9 universities)
Economics and maths (6 universities)
Economics and management (4 universities)
Economics and econometrics (4 universities)
Maths and maths for economics (3 universities)
Economics and statistics (2 universities)
Economics and finance (2 universities)
Banking and finance (2 university)
Business studies and economics (1 university)
Maths-operational research-statistics-economics (1 university)
Economics and accounting (1 university)

From this table I could see economics was one of the most popular courses offered by all universities, but I didn't really want to do a straight economics. I would rather it was combined with another subject or focused on a particular area. The three least popular courses were only offered by one university each, if I chose one of them it would seriously limit my choice of university. I didn't particularly want to do accounting or business studies anyway. MORSE (Maths-operational research-statistics-economics) seemed more interesting, it was only offered at Warwick but I thought I would consider it. Offered by slightly more universities there were the finance courses. I didn't really fancy backing and finance but economics and finance sounded like a nice mix.

Above these I came to the courses with maths. I didn't really want to do a maths based course so maths and maths for economics was out. But I thought any economics with a maths option such as economics and maths or economics and statistics would be nice. Because it would have the balance of two subjects I enjoyed.

In the end after flicking through prospectuses and reading websites I decided I would go for economics and maths or economics and statistics, remembering you don't have to apply to do the same course at all the universities you apply for.