What can I do with a Bachelors degree in Spanish?

Can someone explain exactly what is a Bachelors degree with (Honours) and other degrees?

• I understand that a Bachelors degree is the degree people generally start of with. For instance, a BA, BSc, BEng etc.... and then can go onto a Masters degree is who choose to. ...show more

• Answer:

  Names of degrees all come from Latin. The basic level is "baccalaureus" and that translates into English as Bachelor. Nothing to do with being an unmarried man, so women can be Bachelors too. Master comes from "magister". And at the top level, there are Doctors - to get a doctorate, you're basically looking at doing the whole thing by doing some original research and you get judged entirely on the thesis you write up. It has to be original, something nobody else has ever done before. So yes, if you go to university, you go to study to be a Bachelor of [Something]. In general that's 3 years, though there are some, especially in science and engineering subjects, where you do 4 years and go straight to be a Master because a Master's degree is usually only 1 year long. So if you do a 4 year degree, you've done it all in one go. I went to Imperial College and have a BSc in physics from a 3 year course. They now do a 4 year version as well and that's an MSci. It used to be that you could enrol for an ordinary degree or an honours degree. On an ordinary degree, you just pass or fail. On an honours degree, you get graded into 1st class, upper 2nd class, lower 2nd class, 3rd class, pass, or fail. This is now almost completely irrelevant as all Bachelors degrees are honours and you can just treat it as exactly the same thing as GCSE or A level grades. Classes are just the university way of labelling grades. You get an ordinary or pass degree for being just above the fail mark. The interesting part of that is that degrees in medicine and dentistry are still just pass or fail. Would you really want to be treated by a 3rd class doctor? Those are more professional qualifications than degrees, really, and what you want to know is "are they qualified?" Yes, if you actually are so bad that you fail, you get no degree at all. That happened to 2 students on my course. Obviously a higher class of degree is better. I happen to be an accountant and know that chartered accountancy firms won't accept trainees without a first or a 2:1 (upper second) because they can get enough trainees even with restricting it to that. I managed it with a 2:2 because 30 years ago there weren't so many universities and they took me on with a 2:2. Because university isn't compulsory, nobody will chase you up if you aren't doing the work. You chose to go there, and it's up to you to make best use of the opportunities to learn. This is ADULT education and you're expected to do most of it yourself. Especially in arts and humanities subjects, you can easily find that your timetable is incredibly empty and the lectures are just there to give pointers for your own private study. I did a science subject so we had more formal teaching but it still worked out as 2 lectures and a problem class (where we did maths questions with PhD students hovering around to help) most mornings, 2 3-hour afternoons a week doing lab work, and 1 hour's tutorial with my academic tutor - just 3 of us and him in his office talking things through. That still meant pretty much 3 totally free afternoons a week. Which I had to use to write up the lab work and study more as I needed/wanted to. All the lecturers had office hours so if you really get stuck on something in their lectures, you can go and see them in their office. The opportunities are all there, it's just up to you to make use of them.