Foreign Perspectives

The Open University has a very neat little facility on its student pages called Qualification Planner which is probably one of the most time wasting things that you can play with on their site.

After being told about this facility some four years ago now I found myself suddenly transported from simply “learning a bit more French” to embarking on a modern languages degree. The sheer number of combinations of degrees and diplomas that this little tool comes up with is frightening for sure. Even with just four or five courses entered in you can be talking in terms of dozens of potential degrees and diplomas if you only do one more course…

Even now, I still have that last English course nagging at me. If I do just one more English course I get a Diploma in English. Naturally, if I do that one more course it will open up even more options and would move me that little bit closer to tipping over into seeing an English degree on the horizon. Still, I have finally (after two years) removed the Diploma in English from my “Qualifications that I am working towards” list so perhaps there’s hope for me yet!

However, I’m currently at the silly stage of doing a Diploma in Health Sciences. As it happens I need to do three of the four courses from this for my psychology degree and the fourth one (Infectious Diseases) sounds really interesting. The problem with that is that if I do just one more course then I’ve just about all the bases covered for a Life Sciences degree which I’d not initially thought about but which does seem to have a whole lot of courses that look really interesting and which have fantastic comments against them too.

The additional problem in the case of the Life Science degree is that it’s looking quite likely that the OU will be phasing out the named sciences degrees over the next couple of years and dropping all the corresponding summer schools. Thus if I don’t do those courses over the next two or three years, I’d never be able to do the LS degree. In fact, if I’m going to do it at all I’ll need to do the two level 3 courses in 2011 and 2012 which diverts me from the psychology somewhat but it does seem a shame to miss doing two fantastic courses.