Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey English learners, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 241 of the Listening Time Podcast.
I hope you're doing well.
And that you're excited to practice your English with another episode.
I hope that all of these episodes have helped you improve your listening comprehension.
I'm going to talk about college degrees, university degrees.
And I've talked about university before, but that was four years ago or more than four years ago.
So it's been a long time since I've talked about this subject on this podcast.
So I thought that it was time to talk about it again, and I want to talk specifically about degrees and even more specifically bachelor's degrees, these four-year degrees that that we can obtain in the US.
So I'm sure you'll find this episode interesting and, of course, it will be good practice for your listening skills.
And remember to check out my other podcast, my US Conversations podcast, in which I talk to different English teachers from different parts of the US.
It's a lot of fun.
You learn a lot about this country.
It's great practice for your listening, because I speak with these other teachers at normal speed and provide the transcript for you with the definitions of key words and phrases we use.
And it's a great way to find a teacher.
I've had many listeners who have found an English teacher from that podcast.
So that's another great resource for you.
That link is down below in the description below this episode.
Okay, let's talk about college degrees.
By the way, I always have to say this in the US, college just means university, but native speakers, or I should say Americans, don't say university that often.
We're accustomed to just saying college.
So one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this topic today is because I just had a conversation yesterday with a student of mine who is a doctor in Thailand, and he and I talked about the residency process in the US.
This refers to like when people go through training to become licensed doctors in the US.
It takes years.
It's this big program in the US.
And we were talking about how doctors in Thailand sometimes choose to do a residency program in the US and then they go back to Thailand and work.
And I was asking him whether people did this just because it looks good on their resume, their CV, that they did this in the US, they did this program and so it will help them get a better job or more money when they return to thailand, or if this residency program in the us is actually a really good program that gives these thai doctors necessary knowledge and training that they can't get in Thailand.
So I was asking him about this and it made me think about degrees in general, like bachelor's degrees.
Do bachelor's degrees give us necessary knowledge and training in our field, and are they extremely useful or are they more for our resume?
Do we obtain them? mainly because it looks good on our resume or it's required by employers.
So which is it?
And I'm going to try not to generalize here.
I'm not saying that degrees are good or bad.
I just want to talk about college in general in the US and I'll talk about my experience earning a bachelor's degree, a four-year degree, and I'll give some of my thoughts.
I want to warn you though I will talk a little bit negatively, but I'm not saying anything that degrees are bad or worthless or whatever.
I'm just going to talk about my thoughts and my experience.
So in the US, a bachelor's degree usually takes four years or more.
If you aren't on track or on schedule like Maybe you have to study for longer because you didn't take as many classes as you were supposed to take, or maybe you didn't do well in some of your classes so you need to take them again
But if you pass all your classes and you do everything on time, it usually takes four years to earn a bachelor's degree in the US.
However, the first two years of your bachelor's degree are what we call general ed, and you take general ed classes.
Ed is just short for education.
So what this means is that during your first two years of your degree, you don't just take classes about your major.
Your major is the subject that you're studying in a university, in college, like math or English or whatever.
So, for example, My major was English, but during the first two years of college I took classes that were science classes, math classes, history classes, etc.
I had to take all of these unrelated classes.
And everyone does this.
It doesn't matter which major you choose.
You spend the first two years taking general classes like in high school.
And this is different from other countries.
In other countries, people spend every year of their degree program focused on the actual major program, the actual subject that they're supposed to be studying.
Of course, there are pros and cons to this system in the US.
The main advantage is that in the US, when people start college, they don't actually have to declare a major before they start, meaning they don't actually have to choose the subject that they're studying, yet they can wait until the third year before they actually choose a major.
So some people start college and they don't even know what they want to study.
I remember one of my friends did this.
He did his first two years of college and then decided what major he wanted to study.
This is very different from other countries, of course, and because of this there is the advantage that during the first two years you learn about a lot of subjects, and so that can help you decide which one you're interested in, and then you can choose your major.
However, there are disadvantages because, if you think about it, you're only getting two years of concentrated study related to your subject, your major.
So while in other countries people might study for four years or five years and take classes related to their major, to the subject that they chose, In the US, if you do a bachelor's degree, you only get two years of study related to your major.
So that can be a huge disadvantage and it can feel like you're wasting your time trying during the first and second year if you already know what you want to study.
Most people already know what they want to study, and so it can feel like you're wasting your time in these other general classes during the first and second year.
You can imagine that in my experience, I chose English as my major because I wanted to be a teacher, an English teacher.
You can imagine that I wasn't too happy that I had to take animal biology and I had to take these random classes like that that had nothing to do with my major.
It didn't feel like I was using my time how I should have been using it.
And we pay a lot of money, of course, for college in the U.S.
So a lot of people might feel like it's wasted money when you already know what you want to study but you're forced to take unrelated classes.
Thankfully, I spent my first two years at a community college, as we call it.
This is not a four-year university.
This is a type of college where you can complete your first two years of college.
And some people only go to community college, but other people...
Like me, we transfer to a four-year university after we complete those two years of community college, and then we do the third and fourth year at a university.
And thankfully, community colleges are much, much cheaper than four year universities.
So it wasn't that much money that we had to spend.
And we were taking these general classes, which wasn't fun, but at least it wasn't that much money.
And honestly it just seemed like high school, because in high school you take different general classes.
Except for me, I feel like high school almost felt harder than community college.
So you can see that there are some issues with this.
There are some disadvantages with this type of model.
And so the third and fourth year of college are focused on your major.
So When I transferred to the university and did my third and fourth year there, most of my classes were focused on English.
However, I did still have electives.
Electives are classes that you can choose that are unrelated to your major.
They're just like... fun classes, like, for example, I had soccer class and I had acting class.
Of course, those were not necessary subjects that were related to English, but I still had to take some electives.
So even during my third and fourth year, I still had a couple of classes that were unrelated to my major
But of course, most of the classes that I took were English type classes.
However, I had an issue with my major because I wanted to be an English teacher.
And there is the English major, but there's also the education major.
So if I wanted to be an English teacher, was I supposed to choose English as my major, or or education as my major?
They're both pretty general majors.
And my issue was that I knew that I wanted to be an ESL teacher, like an English as a second language teacher, or I wanted to teach people who were learning English in some way.
So this was a specific job that I knew that I wanted, but there wasn't a way to learn that and to study that specifically.
In a bachelor's program, in a four year degree program.
If I wanted to study that in particular, I had to complete a bachelor's program and then do a master's degree in that specific subject.
And I didn't want to do that.
I didn't want to have to study for four years just so that I could enter a master's program and study math, what I wanted to study specifically.
That didn't seem right to me.
And I chose English, not education.
And honestly, I spent most of my time doing things that were not related at all to what I wanted to do.
I spent most of my time reading literature in these classes, and it wasn't even interesting literature, and there were only a few classes that were relevant and useful for me.
I would say that 90 or more of the time I spent even in my third and fourth year, 90 or more of my classes were completely irrelevant for me, unfortunately.
They had nothing to do with what I wanted to study to become an English teacher for people learning English.
And this isn't the case for other people.
I'm not saying that this happens to everyone.
Of course, most people had a better experience than me.
They got to study things that were more related to what they wanted to do.
But for me, this wasn't the case.
And even if other people do get to study subjects that are more relevant, they might still have a similar issue, just not as extreme as I had it like they might still feel like some of their classes are completely irrelevant or something.
And I just did not like the fact that I could only choose my specific field of interest by doing a master's degree.
Why couldn't I do this?
For my four year degree.
Why did I have to go through these four years and then do a master's degree to learn what I actually needed to learn?
I didn't like that.
I felt like it would have been great to just skip that bachelor's program and do a master's program to get the specific education and knowledge that I needed, but that wasn't a choice.
So you can imagine that my bachelor's degree isn't a good reflection of my knowledge and skills as an English teacher.
And in fact it hasn't even been necessary for me at all in my career to have this bachelor's degree.
I'm saying that it hasn't even helped my resume just because of my particular career.
If I had done something else yeah, it could have been helpful, but for my specific career It hasn't even helped me.
It hasn't done anything to help me get a job or whatever.
What was necessary for me at the beginning of my career was was to get the TEFL certification.
Where I did this TEFL program uh, where I became certified as an English teacher for people learning English.
But that only took me like four weeks to do and it wasn't a degree that was helpful for me in terms of uh, getting a job, but my degree has never actually served me.
It's never actually helped me get a job or whatever.
I will say that I did learn some useful things in my linguistics classes that I took in my fourth year, I think.
But that's it, honestly.
That is the extent of the usefulness of my degree.
So I learned some useful things in those linguistics classes.
But other than that, everything else that I did in all of my other classes was just completely irrelevant.
So it's a little sad, of course, when you think about it like that.
My case is unique and personal to me.
I don't want to say that Everyone has a similar experience.
Of course not.
Many people have a great experience and their bachelor's degrees help them, of course.
But I think there are some lessons to be learned from my personal experience.
Like, for example, if you know what you want to do, if you already know what you want to study because there's a specific job that you know that you want.
If you know this, general education classes and elective classes aren't that useful.
And that's how it felt to me.
It felt like I was forced to take a bunch of classes that weren't going to be useful for me, and I couldn't understand why.
I already knew what I wanted to study, what I wanted to do, so why did I have to take these general classes?
I think many people would agree with me. even if they had a better college experience.
It's still something that is worth discussing.
Like, why do we have to do these general classes if we already know what we want to study?
Another thing is that, when you think about it, It's only two years of concentrated study in your field, because the first two years are general classes.
So only the third and fourth year are concentrated on your major.
And that's not a lot compared to other countries where I know specifically, like in Mexico, when someone does a bachelor's degree type program, they study things that are somewhat related to their major even from the start, from day one.
That's different in the US.
So that's another thing that we might want to question.
Another lesson is that it would be nice to be able to choose a more specific major for a bachelor's program.
Why did I have to choose between these really general majors like English and education?
Couldn't there be just an English education major?
Just combine the two so that I could learn something more relevant to what I wanted to do?
Why can't there be more specific majors for bachelor's programs?
And another lesson is that bachelor's degrees are not always a reflection of our knowledge or our skills in a field.
And, like I said, some people even feel like high school was harder for them than a lot of their college classes.
So I feel like my bachelor's degree has no relation to my knowledge or skills in the field of English, even though I have this degree.
So that's something that I think a lot of people think about.
Like, does a degree reflect your actual knowledge or is it just for your resume?
And of course, this is different for everyone for different subjects.
So I'm generalizing here.
But for me, it's not a reflection of my knowledge or skills.
So all of this is based on my experience in the US.
This is just me talking about my thoughts, my experience.
I'm not trying to change anything.
Many people have had completely different experiences that were more positive than mine.
But this is just me talking about my ideas, my thoughts.
And I think that these are things that are worth thinking about.
All right.
I hope you enjoyed this episode and that it was good practice for your listening.
Remember that the transcript is available for free in the description below this episode.
The link is down there.
And please check out my US Conversations podcast so you can practice listening to my conversations that I have with other English teachers.
And maybe you can even use it to find an English teacher to take classes with.
That link is also down below.
All right, thank you for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of listening time.
