Health and Society DCU

6thyearlife

Hi, Im wondering if there's anyone on here I could get in contact with to chat about this course. Someone doing it now or recently graduated?
Thanks

FHughes95

Hi there, I am a 1st year student that's studying health and society in DCU atm. Ask me any questions you want and I'll try to answer them

kenhan2015

I have a few q's about this course as im very interested in doing it;

what is the work load like in terms of assignments etc?
how many hours per week of leatures etc. approx?
is it difficult?
why have you chosen it, in terms of career etc?
also, whats your favourite module so far & why?

thanks

FHughes95

Yeah it is a quite interesting course that only begun in 2011 so there is only one set of graduates so far.

In the first 2/3 weeks there were no assignment for me at all and then from weeks 4-9 you would have one assignment a week of 500 words most of the time. But in the last 3 weeks of semester one (Late November-Mid December) you may have longer assignments and a few Multiple Choice Quizzes (MCQ's) thrown in also. The last 3 weeks were a bit stressful for me because I procrastinated over the assignments too much. If you do a wee bit early everyday then you have the rest of the day for yourself and you shouldn't feel much stress at all.

The hours were very generous for me as I only had about 11-14 hours a week with only two 9am starts on Wednesdays and Thursdays. So you will have pretty short hours compared to other courses.

The course was not that difficult to me but it did require a lot of thinking and reading over the assignments which may be the most difficult part of the course. If you make an effort to go to lectures daily then you will spend less time on assignments and you will make life easier for yourself.

I choose the course as a back-up for the human nutrition course in UCD. However, I didn't realise that this course may not have enough science related modules in it to go and do a masters in nutrition. The two main areas that graduates have went into were occupational therapy and speech therapy which are both brilliant jobs to qualified for after only 3 years.

I am split between two modules called Perspectives on Health which is just looking at health from different point of views and the Nutrition course because that it the field of work I wish to work in.
Perspectives on Health was enjoyable because the lecturer is a great speaker and he has very interesting ideas and logic, which made me sure to bring my pen and paper to his classes.
The Nutrition course covered an overview of most aspects in biology with two MCQ's. There were also some practical classes such as measing your BMI by meauring your weight, height and waist. These classes were actually good craic as the lecturer left us to it and it helped to bring us together as a group.

If you have any other questions on the course or on college life in general please send them my way

6thyearlife

thanks thats a great help, just wondering is it hard to get into post grad OT or SandL ? also did anyone go straight into employment? thanks

FHughes95

No problem, I'm not sure at the minute of how difficult it is getting into post grad courses. I would suggest emailing a lecturer from the course, here is the e-mail address:

mark.philbin@ dcu.ie

You can ask Mark any questions regarding Health & Society, DCU or general college life.

chinacup

Hiya, have my mature student interview for this on wed. Just wondering has anyone else done that interview & what sort of qtns came up? Shot in the dark here but I'm starting to stress & someone from dcu staff was supposed to put me in contact with a student there but unfortunately never got back Thanks in advance if anyone can answer or perhaps knows someone who could.

eimear kane

6thyearlife wrote: »

Hi, Im wondering if there's anyone on here I could get in contact with to chat about this course. Someone doing it now or recently graduated?
Thanks

hi there, did you apply for the course? i have and i think i will get offered it?

24Weetabix

I just want to strongly encourage anyone considering this course not to do it!

There are absolutely no job prospects after finishing. You will have to do a masters or do a post graduate course afterwards to be employable. And it is quite difficult to get into most masters and post graduate courses.

90% of students in every year are only doing the course because they missed out on a preferred course on their CAO and they picked this course because some of the modules are interesting and the course seems very broad.
The reason more students don’t drop out is because 1st year and 2nd year are really easy within the course so people just stay in the course because they are having fun in college.

Once 3rd year comes around then the work starts getting serious because the degree is based 100% off 3rd year (It is a 3 year course).

Even though I had a lot of fun in DCU while doing this course, it’s important to remember that the purpose of college is to make you employable. If you are not from Dublin, fees and accommodation over the three years can cost you almost €30,000.
It’s not a good investment considering that after graduating you are just as employable as someone without a college education.

If you don’t get your number one CAO choice consider looking abroad to see if you can study your dream course abroad. Or even consider repeating the LC in the institute of education in Dublin if you are willing to do the leaving cert again. (Most people who repeat the leaving cert in the institute say it is a lot more enjoyable than doing the leaving cert in their secondary school because you can choose your own time table and there is a lot more freedom than secondary school. And the teachers are the best in the country).

That’s just my recommendation if I was to go back in time. There are obviously good aspects of the course too.
- Short hours -12 hour week.
- The course work is often easy
- Lots of free time
- very very few mandatory lectures
- Some of the modules can be interesting
-small class of around 40 students (every single year about 90% of the course are girls. Every year there are only around 5 boys out of 40~ students in the class, just thought I’d add that in to give you an idea what the course is like).

It’s a nice course to do if you’re only 18/19 years old and you want to go to college but you are not sure what to do because you missed out on your top CAO preference. If you want to go to college just so you can have “the college experience” and you’re not too fussed about having a good income or good employment opportunities once finishing then this is the course for you.

Also it’s important to remember that many courses nowadays don’t have good employment prospects directly after graduating. For many courses you will often have to do a masters of post graduate so it’s important to consider that before applying for courses.

It’s important to remember that the purpose of college is to make yourself employable and not to just go out partying during the week.

That’s just why I wouldn’t do Health and Society in DCU again, and would strongly recommend against any 6th year student putting it down on their CAO. There are much better courses out there for the same amount of points.