Feel like I was somehow duped into my uni degree

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Timber
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30 Jul 2012, 7:54 am

I think something strange happened when I enrolled for my university course, which I'm even now still unsure what happened even though I'm in my third and final year of my degree. The day I went and officially enrolled for my course I remember getting a sheet of paper with the names of the majors. The particular degree I was doing enabled me to choose my major and then get a lot of choice over electives and units. I wasn't very informed about uni degrees. I just knew I wanted to get an english degree. I told the person doing the enrolling this, I probably even pointed to the entry in the list on the sheet of paper. The weird thing was on the paper, the english major entry was written something like this: ENG/COMM. I found out that the comm stood for communications. I'd never heard of a communications major/degree, and I just assumed it was another term used to denote an english degree especially because they comprised the single entry. Each major had its own entry, its own line. If 'comm' was a seperate major, it should have had its own entry. It shouldn't have been misleadingly subsumed
Even still, I verbally told the person doing the enrolling that I wanted to study the english degree. Some how, some way my major is communications, not english.

Why this has taken me so long to realise this is that for all this time I just assumed, as I said, that communications was another name for an english degree. And again with the way my course is designed I have had a lot of liberty in choosing units which pertain to the english degree. No one has said to me 'you can't choose this unit, you're doing the wrong major' so it's taken me a while to work this out. It's just been in this last year I was choosing units are found I couldn't undertake them for this reason, because they have english prerequisites that I haven't done.
This isn't a disaster because I'm going to do a post grad in a different area but it's still somewhat unsettling that I enrolled for a certain degree and am coming out with a different degree. I don't really know what to make of it - did I do something wrong, did my university's enrolment process do something wrong?



noname_ever
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30 Jul 2012, 12:31 pm

It may be screwed up. As the English department if you are one of their students.



Dantac
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30 Jul 2012, 8:34 pm

I'm not familiar with your particular Univ. but in mine the comm. majors take most of the same classes english majors take.

Perhaps the core requirements of the majors are different but the upper level electives are shared between the majors. If that is the case then you could still take the core requirements or whatever classes you need for the english major and end up with a double major.



Timber
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05 Aug 2012, 4:21 am

Dantac wrote:
I'm not familiar with your particular Univ. but in mine the comm. majors take most of the same classes english majors take.

Perhaps the core requirements of the majors are different but the upper level electives are shared between the majors. If that is the case then you could still take the core requirements or whatever classes you need for the english major and end up with a double major.


Yeah, this is the case at my uni also. I might inquire about the double major, it sounds like a good idea, thanks.



GoonSquad
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09 Aug 2012, 10:23 am

I think you should be able to pull off a double major pretty easily, so maybe it won’t be a total catastrophe.

However, I find it INCREDIBLE that this could have happened. First, this was your responsibility and your fault for not being duly diligent. You should have researched the major in the University Catalog.

Even so, how did this not come up during an advising session? I see my academic advisor every semester and we have a nice long talk about majors, progress, career options, etc. How your advisor could miss this, is pretty incredible as well….


I don’t mean to dump on you, and I hope things work out, but…. Wow, just wow… :?


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