Decide what I want to study

Date: around 18/09/2002

I started with the subject I am already taking and went from there

One of the main problems for me was I enjoy all the subject I am taking for a-level and also might be interested in other subjects such as psychology or engineering. I needed some way to narrow down the list of subjects I might be interested in. The way I ended up doing this was to basically scrap all the subjects I didn't study already and so didn't know much about. Then I looked at the subjects which I enjoyed most and did well in and finally looked at the subject which I thought might be useful for a future job or career.

The subjects I am currently taking at A-level are maths, further maths, economics and physics so the choice of what I studied at university was obviously going to be close to one of these. I suppose I did have the choice of other subjects which were not available at my school such as engineering, law or philosophy. But in the end I decided to stay close to my original subjects.

The choices available to me at A-level can be found on my schools Sixth form prospectus

So firstly I knew I wasn't going to take a creative subject such as art, music or English, and was going to go for something more science based. I was sort of considering a humanities type subject such as business studies, economics, physiology or philosophy but was mainly aiming to do something more maths or science based.

I dismissed a few ideas such as physiology and engineering after finding out a little more information about them because, even though they sounded interesting, I thought I would rather study something I already knew a bit about.

My choices were now down to math, economics and also IT, I dropped IT at AS-level because the course was not very interesting but I still have a strong interest in IT so something down that route wasn't out of the question.

It was now time to thing about what I would want to do after I got my degree. I was vaguely interested in doing something either in finance or IT apart from that I didn't really have much of an idea. With this in mind I scanned a few courses at the UCAS course search a list of the courses whose names I thought looked interesting which could lead to a finance type job are listed below:

Economics and finance
Economics and statistics
Economics and econometrics
Economics and mathematics
Maths-operational research-statistics-economics
Money, banking and finance
Economics
Business studies and economics
Economics and management
Banking and finance
Economics and accounting
Financial mathematics
Financial Economics
Mathematics for financial markets
Economics and accounting

Notice there are no IT courses here, I couldn't really decided whether to do something IT based or economics/maths based. There was no real deciding factor I just decided not to study IT at university.

A more in depth account of wanting to study more than one subject if you are interested in more than one subject.

Now I have a list of courses I might be interested in studying I can start looking at universities that offer these courses. Then I can find some courses and universities that suit me.