Hello everyone,

I've done two years of a languages degree and am thinking about switching to music next year. It's great to be fluent in two foreign languages and of course I'd get better at them by finishing the degree, but the languages are only a small part of the degree course and I feel I'd far rather study music academically than the literature, history and philosophy I do at the moment. I'd still want to spend time abroad later on to keep up my languages, and for the historical side of the music course they'd come in useful anyway.

The university will allow the change, so now I just have to decide whether it's definitely what I want. What's holding me back is that I know I can do well in languages, and I might not be able to in music. I did well in A level music but this is obviously completely different, especially as I'd be going straight into 2nd year. Also, I might feel like a bit of an imposter doing music as most people who study it are far, far better players than I am. That doesn't matter in itself because performance isn't compulsory, and in A-level I did as well or better in the academic side than other people who were excellent players, but it might be that I have a ceiling that I would reach soon.

So it feels risky to change to music, but on the other hand, if I regret not changing and decide later in life to put other things on hold to study music, maybe that would be even more of a risk?

Does anyone have any thoughts, or has anyone had a similar experience?

Thanks in advance!

What do you want to do as a career?

If studying music will *prevent* you from doing that, then it's pretty clear cut - you probably shouldn't switch. I cannot think of any career where that would *actually* be the case, but hey, I don't know everything

I did an academic music degree (along with a computer science one), and I wouldn't rate myself as a top grade performer - there were people on my course who had been playing their instruments five times as long as I had been playing my main instrument, which was horn (though I did start young on piano). I feel that the academic side of music is like the academic side of any humanities subject; if you're bright and hardworking, good at reasoning and writing and curious about the world, then you'll do well. I did well on my course (I know that of the above, I am at least hardworking and good at reasoning and curious about the world ) - as well as most of the more musically experienced people, and better than some of them.

(edit - my, I do ramble - in short, if you can do well in languages I think you can do well in music)

Don't let the imposter feeling get to you, if you decide to do it. If the university is letting you do it, and you are keeping up with the academic work, you have as much "right" to be there. I struggled with this a bit but did get over it in the end.

Music degrees cover such a wide spectrum of studies that you definitely don't need to feel like an imposter. You don't need to be a top-rank peformer to excel academically, and if it wasn't viable then the university wouldn't be allowing it. Your language skills will be of great benefit when it comes to background reading, as there's substantial bodies of existing musicological studies only accessible through foreign-language journals and books, especially in German.

In short, go for it!

I was going to do Modern Languages.... I have just decided to do Music.... (what a strange coincidence!).

I think the languages will help you with the music and you're already used to studying/analysing now so I don't think it'll be that much of a change.

If you don't do it, you'll always have the "what if?" feeling.

Personally, I've found that Music is like a drug and I always end up going back to it, no matter what.
I haven't got a grade 8 (failed twice) and only have two music certificates (grade 5 and grade 5 theory) so I'm sure you won't be the worst (I'm doing 'academic' music).

Would it be possible for you to complete your modern languages degree and then pursue music at postgraduate level? Having done a history degree before going into research in history I can attest that the single most useful skill to have in an academic career is a fluency in languages, especially Latin, German, French, and Italian (depending on the field Greek, Russian, Spanish, and Dutch also seem to be useful). Of course, you don't need to take a degree in modern languages to have a facility in those languages, but it's a good way of obtaining it. Study abroad for a full year is also a very great opportunity.

Would you be able to spend a whole year at a foreign university on the music course? If you were to spend a year at a foreign university on the modern languages course, would you be able to study music, or would you have to take classes in language, literature, history, film, etc? I believe in most modern languages courses the year abroad is an opportunity to master the language, but is not assessed. Certainly that was the case at Oxford: the year abroad could be spent doing anything, as long as it improved the language skills. My feeling would be that it might be a good idea to stick with what you're doing at the moment. You have your year abroad coming up, then your final year, and then you'd have a degree in modern languages with a year's study abroad to your credit.

Having transferred courses myself I am sceptical about how easy it can be to make the change. I started out as a theologian and, while I didn't particularly well in my first public examination, I did get a distinction in one paper and won a prize for Greek New Testament. I decided to take modern history for Schools, largely because I started out with philosophy of religion for theology Schools, which I hated. Philosophy of religion wasn't even compulsory, so I could just have dropped that paper and taken something else in its place. The problem was that, not having taken history Mods, I didn't have much of a background in the academic study of history, and I think that this played a large part in my failure in Schools (not a failure in the literal sense, but I got a 2.1, which felt like a failure at the time, and still does now). I went back into theology at MA level and took a distinction, and then went back into history for a second MA and a PhD. I think that it really is quite important to build up a solid grounding in a discipline. For example, I handle a lot of material in Greek and Latin. I have my Greek course at Oxford to fall back on, and I took Latin for two years as a postgraduate student, but I don't have Greek and Latin in the way that somebody who read Greats would have. I feel that I have covered several disciplines quite thinly (theology, philosophy, study of religions, ancient and modern history, ancient and modern languages), where it would have been better to go into ever greater depth in one subject.

Contrary to what was said above, I'm not actually sure about the link between modern languages (and arts and humanities in general) and music. I got 96% in A-level German, but I got a B in A-level music. I found that music was a very specific, narrow discipline, whose skills were not readily transferred from other disciplines.

Finally, you have to consider, as suggested above, what you want to do in the future. You and I may know that the content of a modern languages degree is about much more than the language, and that you might be just as good at the language without the degree, but what will an employer think? What will an employer think is involved in a music degree? If you are thinking of going into a field where languages will be useful (and where are languages not useful?), e.g. law, banking, strategy/management consulting, intelligence, diplomacy, you might boost your prospects with a modern languages degree more than with a music degree.

Well, there's a rambling reply for you.

Maybe from someone who did both sides of music (performance degree and musicology/theatre studies):

I possibly could have done musicology without massive skills on any instrument. In theory, it was a prerequisite to play the piano (so you could play scores), but in reality, it was neither tested, nor would you have struggled getting by without it. It certainly helps though with studying scores.

You might also find yourself disappointed if you study the academic side of music if you mainly want to perform for example. It can sometimes be quite "dry", and it really depends on what your interests are. I had (and still have) a particular interest in music ethnology and music psychology, but you can do both of them with pretty limited skills on any type of instrument to be honest. Music theory skills on the other hand DO come in handy - I would personally say they are more important than amazing instrumental skills.

Music and language are closely related anyway - especially music history, ethnology and cognition deal with this quite extensively, so it is quite a good field for language geeks

I always wanted to perform as well, so musicology alone wouldn't have done the trick for me for that very reason.

I think the main question you should ask yourself is: What do you want to do afterwards?

Out of interest what languages are you studying?

I am a language nut, I love languages and I would be very wary of telling anyone to drop a languages degree, especially in the UK where foreign languages often don't seem to be considered of any importance when they really should. That said, there's no point continuing with a degree you don't actually want to do because you think it will look good - you may still do well but you won't do as well as you could if you're doing a degree you're really enjoying.

What's made you think about this decision right now? I'm guessing you're dissatisfied with your course, and obviously you don't have to do a degree to learn a language to a high level, especially now with all the resources available online for free or very cheap which make learning even an obscure language possible in a way that simply didn't exist 20 or even 10 years ago. A degree is a great way of learning a language but it's not the only way.

Your languages will help with music as jonathanquinn said, and studying music at postgraduate level is definitely an option but of course that depends on whether you want to do postgrad study and/or can find the cash to do so. Do you know what modules are involved in the music degree you're planning to switch to and if there are any compulsory modules you don't like the sound of? Will changing course affect your funding arrangements in any way? It doesn't sound like it would as you can get loans for 4 years but if heaven forbid you have to repeat a year you might find yourself in financial trouble.


I feel exactly the same way. It took me four years to find my way back to music after starting a Japanese and Spanish degree 6 years ago which didn't work out for a variety of reasons and I'm now halfway through my Open University degree in Humanities with Music (if they did a solely music degree I'd be doing that). That is purely academic, no performance involved but I have no desire to become a professional performer so that's not an issue, my piano studies are completely separate from my degree right now. I don't think I can escape music, if it's going to impose itself on me I might as well run with it.

Thankyou for your replies, everyone. They've given me plenty to think about and I've wavered backwards and forwards a few times in the last few days, but on the whole I'm still keen to change to music. It's really more of a positive move towards music than a move away from languages - it isn't a move away from the languages themselves at all, I want to keep practising them, but I'm not sure I can stick with the rest of the degree and do as well as I'd like to when there's the option of doing music instead. For my year abroad I was going to do an internship as an administrator at a music academy, but if I go on the year abroad I have to complete the language course rather than swapping afterwards. As Tixylix says, money should be fine as student finance are expecting me to do four years anyway.

In terms of the future, for years and years I've wanted to be a teacher, and I'd far rather teach music than a language teacher. The other possibility on my mind is that I went to a talk recently about being an EU translator and that sounds great. In light of that it might seem bizarre to want to change away from languages, but two things that came out of the talk for me were (1) however good the job sounds, maybe I want (a) to be a teacher, and (b) to be doing music every day; and (2) If I did decide to do it, a degree in languages wouldn't actually be necessary - it doesn't matter what subject you've done. I know I'd be 'up against' applicants who had done languages, but fluency in the languages is what counts, rather than all the other stuff in my degree! In short, I don't think changing to music wouldn't close doors to me.

My only slight worry is that I may have got myself into a bind in which I have to choose music, because if I don't then every less-than-perfect moment of my year abroad and fourth year will be spent thinking 'why didn't I do it?' On the other hand I still think changing to music is what I want to do so perhaps I shouldn't worry about it.

Is there anyway you could do languages and music?

My husbands cousin did both a language and music on his degree course. If your university doesn't offer that option look into the possibility of transferring to one which does.

Perhaps worth bearing in mind that if you want to teach music you don't necessarily need to have a degree in the subject. When I started at my secondary school we had a really outstanding director of music whose degree was in maths. He was then succeeded by a gentleman who had graduated from the Royal Academy of Music with the diplomas of GRSM, LRAM, and ARCM in violin and piano as joint principal studies. This second director of music was an extremely good performer, a reasonable conductor, very enthusiastic, and a thoroughly good chap, but he was not really any good at teaching. His predecessor, the maths graduate, was considerably more highly regarded. He was an outstanding pianist and a very creditable horn player, an excellent conductor, most remarkable of all, perhaps, an exceptionally talented composer and arranger, and a very good teacher as well. The fact that he had had no formal education in music beyond A-level himself did not seem to matter a jot. Looking back, I know that I had an excellent history teacher whose degree was in economics and a not bad maths teacher whose only qualification was MInstP (gained when MInstP was available to non-graduates), and another of my history teachers (a really outstanding teacher), whose degrees were, I think, in history, was also reputed to be equally good teaching politics.

Rosie you have my sympathy - I'm heading fast towards what until recently would have been retirement, comforting myself that the extra working years give me more time to decide what I want to do when I grow up. I almost changed what I was studying so many times I ran out of courses to switch to (and never did)

I suspect you can't mix music and languages or you'd be mentioning it. The year abroad is a challenge and a watershed - can be a great experience, a disappointment, or anywhere in between, and the final year is not like going straight into third year - you've grown out of a lot of student preoccupations; on the other hand that is not altogether a bad thing. Quite a lot of people swap degrees before the year abroad (one of my children did mod lang, the other music; both considered changing at some point in their studies - it represents an open mind). If you have doubts about the year abroad that's facing you, it makes the pressure to decide all the greater, especially as you are then committed to mod lang for the final year - a familiar scenario (in contrast, a decider here was the year abroad looked too good to miss - proved correct in that lucky case). Neither music nor mod lang will have you playing music or speaking your languages all the time - it's not unknown to have little of either in the final year: how excited by the options are you? I am told music and mod lang degrees are considered good prep for an awful lot of professions so it doesn't sound as though you are closing any doors - and if you're considering teaching then obviously both are good.

Try tossing a coin and watch what your emotions are when you see which way the toss has gone (if your feelings stay the same over a few days' trials, you know what the right decision for you is). OR imagine next year not doing one or the other. (Neither of those helped around here and there were extended periods of pondering, talking and angsting.) Good luck



Schools? Mods? Jonathan, could you bear with the vast majority of us who have no idea how the Oxford system works? Excellent as it undoubtedly is.

I think you would really struggle to get onto a teacher training course now without a degree in the subject. Places keep being cut and are very competitive. I am a mentor for a teacher training provider and I know that they insist upon at least 50% in the specialist subject and at least a 2:1. I think there are occasions where you are able to make your way into teaching something that isn't your specialist subject once you're in school, but I think this is a pretty risky strategy. It's perhaps a little easier in a private school, from my friends' experience. If you're fairly certain you want to be a music teacher then I think you ought to be doing a music degree.

On the other hand, I think that if you're studying something you love - whether that's music or languages - it will lead you to a career you enjoy. The issues arise when someone studies what they think they ought to be studying, rather than what they choose to.

I know it's hard when you're really confused but try to go with your gut feeling. The coin toss is a good suggestion! Or think, if you were going to a lecture at 9am tomorrow and you could choose your current course or a music class, what would you choose?

You'd also struggle to get a job - as an NQT, you'd be up against umpteen other candidates all holding a music degree. You'd be lucky to get onto the shortlist.


Postgrad music is a very different kettle of fish. Undergraduate courses cover an enourmous breadth of material, overlapping into all sorts of other fields, as varied as psychology, linguistics, paper studies, and politics. On the other hand, even a taught Master's involves a high degree of specialisation on a specific period/genre/composer/etc.

Greats??

Greats is essentially Classics (classics, and not classical studies, as someone who has studied the latter but not the former!)

You take Mods or Prelims (honour moderations or preliminaries) usually at the end of your first year. Mods are classified, prelims are pass / fail, which one you do depends on the subject you are taking.

Schools is Final Honour Schools, your final exams at the end of your last year.

In most Oxford degrees your end result is based solely on the exams at the end of your final year, though this is changing in some subjects and second year exams are coming in and contributing to the final mark.

A double first means that you got a first in mods and finals, usually (or it can mean you did a joint honours degree and got a first in both subjects)

I'm a great believer in going where your heart is. It is harder to switch careers after you've graduated.

If you want to make a career in music, and the music degree that your university is offering will help you, and you can gather the money to switch (if it is any extra), then go for it.

Have you spoken to a careers guidance officer?

it is and it isn't - according to the OU, 40% of graduate jobs are open to graduates of any discipline. if you're wanting to do something very specific, with specific requirements, then it is very important - a desire to be a pharmacist when you've done a history degree does mean starting over again. But, if you aren't heart set on something which needs specifics then it's less of an issue.
The ideal is if you want something specific then you'll want to do the specific qualification or course, otherwise you can just pick what you want to do best. Either way, you'll be dong what you want most

I agree and it seems to be as true today, judging by my children's and their peers' experiences, as it was several hundred years ago when I was starting out - both in times of high graduate unemployment. It takes time and determination. I would say that masters' degrees seem to be the route to change - expensive but universities seem (from our experience) less bothered about prior qualifications and more concerned with interest.

However looking back at what the OP originally asked, she was concerned about doing as well if she switched as if she carried on the path she's on. That's a tough one, and I don't think we've necessarily addressed it.

The university accepted you to do a specific subject, which gives you confidence, and you've got a couple of years' results to show you how you're doing. It is a leap in the dark to change - set against, as you say, the 'what if' if you don't. To be positive, you're not going straight into final year, so you have two years' university experience to set against the one of the people you'll be judged against, and you have the transferable skills you've acquired in the language studies [more than language skills] which they don't have. How well you'd do in music is an unknown - music students tend to have very different backgrounds - from maths/physics to all-arts, with music as the only common feature. Some of them will be depressingly knowledgeable and competent. Do you have some time to put in before the decision is irrevocable? Would a kindly music staff member/PhD student give you a tutorial/essay exercise or two to see how you fare? I can think of one student who had made the decision to change - and then changed back before the next term started. Take your time, don't worry about vacillating - the staff will have seen it all before.

Thanks everyone, I'm still keen to change, especially as I had a really helpful message from another student who made almost the same change a year ago and is loving it! The only hurry to decide is that I don't want to mess my year abroad employer - I got the email from them offering me the internship a few hours after the meeting where I found out it was definitely possible to change to music and decided I wanted to do it, so I sent them an email explaining the situation but of course I can't leave them waiting all summer!

Everyone seems to be assuming thta a degree course has to be preparation for a career and the world of work. As degrees in the UK are now so expensive that is an understandable point of view.

But when you did not have to mortgage your future to do a degree in the UK it was possible to study a subject simply because it interested you, even if the prospects of a career in that subject were tiny. The country needs its specialists in obscure areas of knowledge. The trouble is that we can't predict in advance which will become practically useful in the years ahead.

It sounds to me that in your heart you want to switch to a music course, but are looking for re-assurance.

My prof reckoned that the proportion of music graduates getting jobs immediately was above the average for all graduates. I can see why that should be in general: a performing musician of music graduate standard (not usually as high as that of conservatoire trained performers) has had to do a lot of self-directed work, and should be impeccable at getting to appointments on time, so ticks the "self-discipline" box on the assessment sheet.

In particular, unfortunately, Reading Music Department did not emphasize punctuality as an essential characteristic of its undergraduates. Rehearsals of the Symphony Orchestra, in which instrumentalists were expected to play, rarely started on time.

Very, very tricky. In your situation, Rosie91, I would be wondering if there was any way at all that both could be done, even if you finished languages (in which you are already confident you will do well) and then did music afterwards somehow. On the other hand, zooming ahead to the future and the world of work, there is not much point doing something you will do well if you are going to be unhappy and wishing you were working with music. From what you have said, it sounds as if you have given this great thought and in your shoes I would take the gamble and switch to the music degree if it is not possible to do both.

Couldn't you do a joint degree? Of course you could only do it with one language, but a joint honours in, say, Music and German might be a good compromise, and you would still get your year abroad.

I'm sure Edinburgh and Glasgow Unis offer this, and no doubt others too.

Rosie, I just wanted to offer my opinion - I didn't switch degrees halfway through but I was a bit of a latecomer to music (didn't do GCSE and went straight into A-Level, knowing very little!) and have always felt like a bit of an imposter. You mentioned feeling like an imposter in your post, and I just wanted to say that for me it's always just been something that I felt and not anything that I think anyone else had noticed. I had the opportunity to develop greatly as a person and as a musician thought doing a music degree and actually ended up winning the university's recital prize in my final year. Yep, I'm a total imposter but I'm so happy that music is a part of my life. I think it would be a part of my life anyway, but I think doing a music degree has really added to that and I'm so glad I did it.
Of course, only you know the details of whether your uni's music department is any good, etc.

Apologies. Schools: exams taken at the end of the degree course. Mods: exams taken (in some subjects) some time in the first or second year. Greats: classics.

The Oxford system is *not* excellent. The OP is very fortunate to be a student at a proper university.

Would you consider going into the first year of the music degree? I have a friend who started out reading computer science then decided that he wanted to read history, so went into the first year of the history degree. If your university offers an exit qualification, which I assume would be the DipHE, after two years, then you might not see your language study as a waste. It would, of course, be an expensive option, but academically it might give you the best grounding for your more advanced studies.

And there are definitely places that do Spanish and Music - I can't remember where, but I know I've seen it.

It's one thing to switch horses midstream. It's quite another to suggest that instead someone should haul themselves out of that river and jump into another. It's unfortunately easy to suggest doing it, but not so in practice: it's financially ruinous even supposing you can fund it at all (Student Loan Co funds one degree, not two - those of us of riper years who benefitted from grants should not underestimate debt), there's the hiatus in education - either entering through clearing this year or re-applying for 2013 entry - & how does the OP support him/herself until then? Quite apart from leaving friends and the familiar behind. Having supported someone seriously considering dropping out (because that is what it is) and re-applying elsewhere, it should not be suggested lightly.

For the OP, that desperate step doesn't seem to be necessary, rather the less disruptive (but still difficult) decision of whether a switch to a different course within the same university is the best option, and having to make a sudden-death decision because of the year abroad. I suspect joint honours at that university are not an option, or not at this stage, so the fact that other universities offer them is probably immaterial.

Of course it's not suggested lightly and I'm sure that the OP wouldn't take such a step without looking at it very closely and seriously indeed. The suggestions about joint honours - at whatever university - came from (on my part, anyway) a feeling that although the OP would love to study music, there is still a part of them that believes they shouldn't abandon languages completely. It is also possible that with a year of languages under their belt, a joint honours course is something that could be switched to midstream. Presumably even if the OP changes subjects at the same university this wouldn't be switching midstream as they would have to start the second subject from scratch, and the funding rules would apply the same to that scenario as to changing universities completely? I'm asking because I don't know. A friend of my son's has changed universities but not courses, so will go straight into the second year, as if he had stayed put, so I would guess that will have no affect on his loan.

But sometimes changes have to be made. The son of some friends of mine has changed courses and universities and it was a decision that no-one took lightly. He completed his first year, but was so desperately unhappy there it seemed almost certain that if he went back he was likely to to drop out altogether, or make himself ill. He has had to work for a year - and did find jobs to support himself - has gone through the UCAS process again and is starting a new course at a new university this September. I don't know what arrangements have been made regarding funding and whether a student loan was still available to him - I'll have to ask.

Thanks for your ideas everyone. To clear things up, simultaneous joint honours isn't possible, but joint honours would sort of be what I'd end up with, because I've done two years of languages and would go into second year music and therefore do two years of that. I most definitely don't want to leave my university!

Bass Clef, I also did Music A-level without GCSE. "Imposter syndrome" nearly stopped me from doing it but in the end it was by far my favourite A-level.

I've said it on the forum before so I may as well let the "secret" out on this thread too that I'm at Cambridge - so perhaps not such a "proper university" after all, if a proper university is very different from Oxford!

You can get 4 years of full-time funding (8 part-time). This doesn't have to be on the same course or at the same university - if say you switch course at the end of the 1st year to a new course then you can still get 3 more years of funding. The OP would be switching after 2 years into the 2nd year of a new degree, so total 4 years and so still good.

I know someone who failed their 1st year twice so switched to a new 3-year degree, they would have had to self-fund their final year of the new course as that would have been year 5 (though they dropped out entirely well before that). This is why the NHS pays the tuition fees for the final year of a medical degree, because it is 5 years and you only get loans for 4.

I'd heard it was quite good



... which would cover the suggestion in the OP which talked about degrading and 'repeating' 2nd year in a different subject. Excellent. But it would not cover dropping out after two years and starting somewhere else afresh. Someone doing that would be hit with finding final year costs including ?9k fees. The suggested plan preserves the ~?3k fees presumably and a new course, starting 2012/13 would presumably mean ?9k throughout. Maybe it should not colour decisions, but it sometimes does or even has to. Unless one is rich.

Sorry Rosie, I guess you don't need (want?!) me fighting battles on here, but you don't seem struck with desperation, more reasonable perplexity.

I see, thank you That means both lads mentioned in my post will be covered It means a greater loan, of course, but at least in the case of 3-year courses, or someone in the OP's situation, it means that if you realise you have made a huge mistake, a change of direction isn't completely out of the question.

I'm puzzled. My degree was 5 years long, and not medicine. Although one of those years was a sandwich placement, I still was able to take out a loan during it.

I think you can get funding for as many years of the degree you applied for as its it takes a normal student to obtain it. Clearly a 5 year course, requires 5 years of funding.

I can't say for certain, but I wonder if the NHS pay for the final year of a medical degree because after four years the equivalent of a Bachelor's degree has already been gained?

Nah, that doesn't work either. I was doing an undergraduate masters, as is normal for many science and engineering degrees now. You've likewise done the equivalent of a Bachelors after 3 years, and indeed, can walk away from most of the courses at that point, regardless of what you signed up for.

Neat - you get a loan for a master's that way

Maybe the funding rules are different if you are doing an undergraduate masters rather than just a bachelors - you often have to really root around for details and the Student Loans Company are incredibly unhelpful at best.