Foreign Perspectives

Thanks to the “short” list of courses that I ran up last summer whilst thinking about what I do following the modern languages degree, I find that there’s quite a lot of scope for shortening the period to pick up the first two degrees from the overall sequence.

TWO degrees? Yeah, I know, it seems a little crazy to be thinking of doing two degrees at once but when I ran through the list of possibilities I ended up with the bulk of two separate degrees worth of courses having my little stars beside them. Thus over the next 10 years or so I will be working my way through both a psychology and a physics degree along with a few totally unrelated courses that seem close to forming a history degree.

Anyway, because the two degree programmes aren’t actually designed to be taken at once there’s quite a lot of scope for me to play with the scheduling of the various courses. Moving more than five years out is way too complicated as OU courses come and go but looking at the next three or four years there are still oodles of viable sequences that can be created and a surprising amount of time to be saved.

For instance, my original plan was basically to do the first major physics sequence followed by the first major psychology course sequence and finishing up with the archaeology course. That results in a completion date of December 2014. However, it’s actually possible to complete the same sequence of courses in December 2012 by changing the order slightly and removing what would have been quite long gaps between courses at several points.

Sadly, I don’t think it’ll be possible to shave so much time off in later years though there’s at least one spot where a year can be saved several years from now.