Law in UCC

AddictedToYou

Hi folks!

I'm currently in 6th year and after going to plenty of talks on various courses at yesterday's open day I think law is going to be the course for me, specifically Law and Irish or Law (International).

However I'd like to get some feedback and information from any current or past UCC law students. What's the course content like? Are lectures interesting? Workload for both straight law and law with a language? What do you hope to do after you finish your degree? etc..

Personally, I'd be interested in getting into journalism, but after a lot of thought and research have decided against a Journalism degree. You might think that I'd go for English in Arts but I'd rather have a 'strong' law degree so that I'd always have the option of becoming a solicitor or barrister.

Any help is much appreciated!

jacko1

really good experience of it a couple of years ago - first year - you do the basics (all colleges the same). 2nd & 3rd year really good.

got most out of eu, environmental and medical law.

lecturers really good although theyve lost their two best professors recently

Dave47

Its a pretty interesting course and is a more robust degree than journalism imo- very flexible RE options after college. Interesting course definitely- i you have an interest in history, politics and/or english than this would be a good course for you- pretty rewarding and you`ll find the hours are pretty good, esp. compared to the science subjects

daniel.ocarroll

Addicted to You,

I'm in a very similar position to you. I want to study journalism postgraduate (actually I run a website called CorkStudentNews.com which you might have heard of), but am currently studying law.

Dave47 is spot-on about law being more robust, but I personally find it horribly boring.

Having worked at my website for a while and a newspaper in New York in the summer, what I'd say is that journalism is something which you can easily pick up 'on-the-job', as a lot of journalists do.

There are certain skills you'll have to learn like clear writing (I'm not holding myself up as a paragon, by the way, far far from it), how to write press releases, typing and maybe even short-hand, but you don't really need an undergraduate course to teach you this.

Law, however, I find to be extremely boring. I've always been interested in enterprise and staring businesses, and used to dabble in a bit of stock trading, so this is in retrospect what I should have gone for.

Do law if it's really what you want to study, not just because it's 'robust' and because other people are telling you to study it.

Make up your own mind, but keep in mind what I said about journalism!

LutherBlissett

I didn't study Law in UCC, but generally;

If your leading interests are things like History and Economics, it's true that certain Law subjects touch on them (e.g. Constitutional, Commercial, Company etc.).

However, if you really, genuinely want to study them, I'd think long and hard about whether you should choose Arts instead of Law. Otherwise, you could end up spending 4 years with History and Economics on the periphery of your Law courses while wishing you could have studied them pure. Just a caveat to consider.