Hi everyone, Ben here again and today I'm going to be giving you a quick rundown of the type of biomedical courses at university, what they mean, what they're like to study and hopefully at the end give you a useful bit of advice.
So the first obvious division is between vocational degrees and... hmm, not really sure what you'd call the opposite, maybe academic degrees(?). Vocational degrees in the biosciences are those focused on a very specific career at the other end of it. The classic examples of degrees like this would be Medicine, Nursing, Occupational Therapy.... etc. The role of these degrees to give you the required knowledge and (crucially) skills to immediately enter the corresponding job at the far end of the course. This affects the course structure, and the kind of stuff that you're going to be learning.
This means that in these courses you're going to be spending far more time on the actual mechanical skills that you're going to be required to learn. You're going to get time with actual patients and equipment as well as experience shadowing professionals and all that good stuff. The downside however is if you don't like the job and don't enjoy the content there's not a huge scope for you to pick what you want, very simply no matter how much your doctor might not like studying immunology you still expect them to be able to diagnose an autoimmune disorder.
The other types of degree which I've decided to call academic degrees (and a brief Google search seems to agree with me) are typically more broad. As opposed to focusing on a particular job they instead look at a field of scientific knowledge. The aim of these degrees is to educate you broadly about the most important aspects of this field and to allow you in later years of the course to work towards picking particular specialties or area of interest within these domains.
The upside of this structure is that it allows for greater freedom for the student to start reading broadly and take time to narrow down what it is that they specifically are interested in. To give you an anecdote from personal experience, I have found myself perusing vastly different aspects of neuroscience in my final year than many of my peers have chosen, with myself focusing on fine detail of inter-neuronal interactions and many of my peers choosing to instead look at the broader cognitive and imaging side of things.
There are however downsides to these degrees. Firstly it may mean (and did for me) that you will spend some time, particularly in earlier years, looking at course content that doesn't relate to things you are planning on pursuing further. This is particularly acute if you enter your degree with a very clear idea of what you want to do within it (of course many people find that a topic that they had initially dismissed instead grabs their attention, and are grateful for the breadth of topic). The other downside is that there isn't necessarily a clear career or profession waiting for you at the far end of it, again for some people this may be a plus, but nevertheless it is worth mentioning.
So having told you all that, what's the point? What can you do with this information? Well my advice is as follows.
1. If you're going to undertake a vocational degree you've got to be pretty sure that you're going to want to do the job at the far end of it.
2. If you're thinking instead of undertaking an academic degree look at the modules within them.
There's going to be a huge variety of options between universities and courses. While you aren't going to predict if a topic is going to suddenly grab you it's worth looking at the modules within courses and making sure that topics match your interests. You're going to be studying there for a while so make sure it's something you enjoy.