For being furious at DH telling DSD that my degree isn't a real degree?

[TooFarGone]

So DH is sat down with his DD taking about careers etc. He says to her "these days, you need a job that pays at least £20k a year but at the same time, you don't want to be stressing yourself out with difficult degrees and stuff. You want to enjoy your time at uni. That's why I think nursing would be ideal for you! you get to go to uni, you don't have to do a difficult degree and you get a well paid job at the end of it!".

So DSD says "But isn't a degree in nursing going to be just as difficult?" and he replied "no course not, they call it a degree but its not like a real degree".

I'm furious as I worked bloody hard to get my degree and he knows this. It isn't an "easy option" at all. I had it out with him and he apologised for upsetting me but still maintains that nursing is an easy alternative to doing a "real" degree.

bruffin "It still didn't make it a degree and you started at 16 not 18."

Actually you couldn't start SRN until you were 18. Both my sisters did something else after leaving school until they were old enough to start the course.

When I was at uni in the Dark Ages I lived with two nursing students and I can tell you that they worked a darn sight harder and longer hours than I did (I read History)

That's before we even get into how sad what he said made me :( seems like he doesn't want her to aspire :(

What does your DSD want to do? It's fair enough dh giving her some 'advice' (warranted or not!) but what does she exactly want to do?

I am a university lecturer who has spent wednesday afternoons and saturdays doing UCAS days and find myself talking to parents who are anxious about employment etc. Fair enough (Especially when students will need to pay back the 9K/year at some point), but alot of the time, the students themselves aren't asking the right questions (why do I want to do this? what am I going to 'be' when I 'grow up'?).

your daughter needs to ask these questions - if it's nursing. Great! but she'll need to then find out the reality of what nursing actually entails. I had always wanted to do Psychology - and did do so. But the first year Stats class nearly derailed me(and subsequent Stats classes in subsequent years got harder and harder!). Now, students say 'I want to do Psychology so that I can understand my boyfriend/mother/girlfriend...etc!)' - and when they hit stats, many drop out.

Good luck OP.

I've done both an academic degree and a nursing degree and nursing was the harder by a country mile. Your poor DD'll get the shock of her life if she listens to her dad and comes into nursing for an easy life.

Nursing is easy?

What the hell? It's academically hard, and physically demanding with placements, and in a later career as a nurse, making a mistake could cost someone else's life...

Personally, I'd do far better with a Physics degree and your step-daughter will have her own, different skill-set, again.

YANBU.
The best degree for your DD is the one which she wants to do and is good at. This will ensure she has the best time at university and a personally fulfilling career.

First of all, he's being patronising about his D; he's giving the message that she shouldn't worry her pretty little girly head about hard stuff.

Interesting that he's trying to advise her not to strive while putting you down at the same time: does he have an attitude problem?
If she wants a good job and a decent life, taking hard A levels in traditional subjects and going to a good university is a good route whatever the sex. If she's not sure of whether she wants to study, why not look for an apprenticeship in a worthwhile area? She'll get paid to study, then.

Disclaimer: DP and I encouraged our DD into "hard" subjects. She's just come out of Uni with a great chemical engineering degree and a job that will pay £28k in her first year while she is being trained for more responsibility. She had a fantastic social life, made good friends, got regularly wrecked but still worked hard.

While I respect nursing, there is absolutely no way that it is as academically hard as a degree in the hard sciences.

Why do nurses suddenly feel the need to be 'good' at everything? Yes, we respect that it takes 3 years, that the hours are crap and the pay rubbish for 3 whole years training. Yes, we respect that we couldn't live without nurses, but, for goodness sake, you don't need to be Einstein to do it.

I have a vocational degree (midwifery) as well as a previous academic one. Midwifery degree was loads harder. Not only do you have to do a full degree but you have to do loads of shifts on the ward as well.

However I do see the sense in advising his dd to do a vocational degree when unemployment is so bad for young people. Of course support her in whatever she wants to do and she may hate the idea of nursing and be passionate about English Lit, etc but I do wish someone had told me that with my first degree it would be a nice 3 years but then I'd end up doing admin jobs for the next decade.

And making a mistake as a car mechanic couldn't cost somebody else's life? Or being a driving instructor who is tired and fails to pull the learner away from the other care couldn't cost somebody else's life? Or the lab assistant who makes a mistake in his calculations and blows up the lab couldn't cost somebody else's life? Every job has a level of responsibility, for god's sake.

Wamster you are absolutely right that you don't have to be the most groundbreaking theoretical physicist of the twentieth century to be a nurse but given what we know about Einstein's family life I reckon he'd have made an absolutely shit nurse.

Nursing requires a high level of technical knowledge about medical practice, coupled with excellent communication skills, an ability to relate to patients with diverse and challenging needs and an ability to do all this quickly! I think what is rarely appreciated about nursing is that many of the advances in patient care in fields like cardiology and oncology at the moment are coming from nursing studies and not medicine. Chemotherapy, for example, is a pretty unsophisticated treatment, and what determines how horrible it is for any individual patient is not how the prescribing physician decides on the dose but how nursing staff help to manage side effects, alleviate pain and maintain the patient's dignity.

I'm not a nurse. I'm an academic lawyer at one of the top three law schools in the country. My sister (who has a 1st class degree in economics) is a nurse. I reckon she's at least as smart as me and it pisses me right off when people assume that nursing is not a mentally demanding job.

GetOrf - "I think that was because of some class-based bias (he was exceptionally left wing) and he loathed Oxbridge and all it stood for. Certainly lots of very clever students were put off from considering Oxbridge by teachers."

Yes you got it spot on. DW is from a two-up-two-down council estate, FIL worked for the local council and Grandad the steel mill. FIL always told her she could do anything she wanted and no one should stop her. Backed hr al the way eve tough he never wnet to university himself. Lots of the chldren she met at Comprehensives had been put off by their teachers and encouraged to 'aim low'.

My Dad told my sister she should get a nice job as a secretary rather than go to university which she was quite capable of.

Gaaaarggh ....... this so get my my hackles up!!!!!

Warmster, just out of interest what do you do?

Wamster

You're completely right that mucking up as a car mechanic could kill someone.

However: "While I respect nursing, there is absolutely no way that it is as academically hard as a degree in the hard sciences."

For whom? It depends on the person. I have seen other people keel over with horror at mathematical problems I am happy to do for fun in a lunch-break. But there is no way I could ever write a degree-level sociology essay.

I would have loved to have gone to Oxford. I had it all planned - I was going to apply to Christ Church and join the Union and everything.

It probably is a good thing I didn't go! i would have been too young for it anyway, would have probably gone off the rails, is better that I studied when I was a little older.

My oh is a nurse and thinks that nursing should not be a degree ad resents their introduction

Degrees are for academic courses nursing is a vocational one he feels more time in the hospital doing and less time in the lecture hall would do a lot of new nurses a world of good.

But thats labour for you trying o turn everything bar clipping toe nails into a degree.

Ops oh is a bit harsh but in the context of a wider debate is should not be a degree

I was put off applying to Oxbridge - slightly by attitudes of the teachers, also by fellow students. And by my own preconceptions about what it would be like - have wondered since if this was a mistake.

Looking back, though, I don't think it would have suited me at all, even if I had applied and managed to get a place. Now that I've met people who've been there, it sounds absolutely awful - it seems the students are very, very micro-managed and spoon-fed with the compulsory tutorial system, their time is not their own at all. That would have driven me crazy. As would all the restrictions on where you could live, having to dress up for formal dinners etc. The way I saw it, I was an adult, and as long as I turned up for the exams and got good results, what I did the rest of the time was no one else's business.

And I think a lot of comprehensive pupils who do well are very independently-minded and used to managing their own time and taking responsibility for their own learning (we had to be!) and so that sort of system could really chafe. It probably does suit the hothoused, privately-schooled kids better.

Maybe this is too much of a generalisation, and while of course it would have been fantastic to have Oxford/Cambrige on my cv, I don't think having been to slightly 'lesser' universities has really held me back. You never know what might have been, of course!

Really well don't agree if you are up for a job with someone of of the same degree and the only thing that could tell you part is the uni most companies will vote for oxford every time

Sorry but a degree from some tin pot uni and one from Oxford are not the same

(FYI not suggest you come from a tin pot uni as I don't know you :)

Haven't you left him yet OP, I thought you were going to months ago? He remains a twunt.

I went to Manchester and Imperial, which I hope aren't seen as 'tin pot', though I agree they don't have the 'impact' of Oxford on a cv from an employer's point of view. Didn't stop me getting a fairly prestigious and well-paid job graduate job in the City though (which I no longer do, but that's a different story!)

Also I wouldn't have met DP or my best friend if I'd gone to Oxbridge, so some things work out for the best :) - oh but maybe I would have met some other even more wonderful people...who knows, it's all in the past now anyway!

"And is £20K a huge salary to aspire to or something?"

Depends where you live - where I grew up, it was, because there were few professional jobs. When I graduated I didn't earn that, certainly - but then I didn't go into my degree purely for the promise of earning X amount p.a at the end.

"David Beckham Studies" is a tabloid canard - someone undertook a PhD which focused on Beckham. If I had the UCAS book in front of me I bet I'd struggle to find it.

My dad said to me when I graduated that 'you could maybe start as a secretary, and if you're really lucky, you can work your way up to being a PA.' I was a former child prodigy, with a strongly academic degree and no administrative aptitude whatsoever, but in his mind, that's what women did. And he had a degree and a career in The Professions - but mainly in very old-skool places where the women were 'the girls on reception.' I now earn more than he did then.

I didn't apply anywhere south of Warwick as I thought the cost of living would be too high (and this was in the time when fees were paid for and I still got a grant which covered books & rent) - plus if I'm honest I wanted to be able to get home easily if I could, but also be some distance from home for a bit of independence.

Oxford and Cambridge were "down South" and anyway, too posh for me I thought. Anyway, I went to an ex-poly in the end but I've done well for myself really, and no-one in my family had been to uni before, no internet then so there wasn't as much advice around so I made the best choices I could at the time. Like someone else said my parents were clever enough to have gone to uni but their parents were all a bit "know your place" so they couldn't even aspire to it, even though in the late 50s they probably would have got a full grant etc. My dad was also a very good footballer and signed for a top club...but his dad thought he'd be better off getting a steady "job for life" in the steel industry. I should add that losing his mum at 16 probably had a lot to do with it. His dad went to pieces and my dad looked after his two young siblings, he probably didn't feel he could swan off up and down the country playing football. Also footballers didn't earn that much then, they had a maximum wage...

I'm worried about how much it will all cost if my daughters continue into higher education - though we'd sell the house if we had to, whatever to get them there. I think a lot of kids will end up living at home while they're at uni (if they can). At least where we live there are all the London ones in commuting distance and Kent, though I'd encourage them to go to wherever they want and not worry about cost.

I wanted LSE, until I realised how much more it cost to study in London compared with how much more loan I would get. I did apply to Cambridge but the don who interviewed me was such an absolute tosser - the first thing he asked me was what my father did for a living, the second (after showing surprise that he was an architect) where he worked - and going to uni for me was as much about leaving for a better place as studying, and I wouldn't have found what I wanted at 18 in Cambridge. I think I made the right choice for me.

I also made the choice to study what I was interested in, rather than what was most likely to earn me money at the end. Whenever I met business students I got the impression they made the latter choice, and I did not envy them even as I paid off my huge overdraft incrementally after graduation.

Oxford is not necessarily the best university for all courses - it doesn't teach the subject I studied anyway, and the best course of my discipline was where I gained my degree from (Bristol, am not biased of course!)