Choosing the right science degree to study is a task which is often given less thought than it deserves. Many students end up making a decision which they come to regret, and some change their degree course for this reason.
This is mainly due to students liking their initial choice in school, and going to university with the pretence that studying that subject at university will be exactly the same as it was in school.
For many science subjects, the type of thinking required, as well as the content, differ widely between school and university.
A classic example of this is mathematics. Until the age of 16, school pupils are taught that maths is about memorising formulae and methods, and regurgitating them as accurately as they can in an exam.
As students progress to A-levels, they are gradually exposed to what ‘real’ maths is – using intuition to solve problems, and also understanding why the method they’re using works rather than just to know it.
However, university maths is still a massive leap from school maths; not only is the workload much more intense, but it is also many times more rigorous, in that students are required to understand fully every step of proving a theorem.
When it comes to choosing which scientific degree to take, it is best to consider not only what is interesting, but also what type of thinking each one requires.
For example, pure maths needs straightforward mathematical intuition, while applied maths uses the ability to systemise information from a problem and turn it into maths. Pure maths is about proving theorems, and applied is about using them, with some real-world examples. Applied maths is closer to A-level maths.
Physics students cannot get away with a poor understanding of maths, because most of a degree in physics is studying the theory rather than doing the experiments, and since physics is more fundamental than the other sciences it naturally requires more mathematics.
While physics as a subject may seem very general, the mode of solving a problem is usually very standard: use maths to describe a physical system in as much detail as possible, solve the equations that result from this, and interpret the solutions in terms of the physical system, giving them real-world meanings.
Sometimes, for a physics problem, the actual solving of the equations is easy enough, but the difficulty comes in obtaining the equations from the information given in the problem. Obtaining the information is called systemising and it is key to any science.
The difference with physics is that sometimes the equations obtained are not easy to solve, and sometimes they’re impossible to solve precisely, so will need some type of approximation.
Chemistry students need to have some mathematical foundations, however a degree in chemistry is very experiment-heavy and for this reason an aspiring chemist will need practical intuition as well: the ability to predict the outcome of an experiment. Similar principles apply for Earth science/geology.
For engineering undergraduates, the practical element is vital, and engineering also requires scientific creativity, or ingenuity. Some university courses allow for specific types of engineering such as chemical or mechanical, and for these an interest in and solid understanding of the related science is important.
The use of mathematics in engineering is, in general, more for the purpose of calculations than for the theory and for this reason the maths is usually simpler than the maths used for physics, even though the intuition required is very similar.
Medical sciences are usually assessed through essays, making good and efficient communication necessary. They involve understanding a system in the same way that other sciences do, but medical systems are usually more complicated than the problems studied in other sciences and a result it is better to commit certain facts to memory rather than to understand them in full. As a consequence, having a good memory is helpful for medical students.
All sciences share a common thread – scientific intuition, the ability to understand what a real system does and consider how it will respond to a change. So, if you are not sure precisely what you are best at, but you are interested in understanding the natural world, then you might opt for a joint-honours or general science degree such as natural sciences. Alternatively, you may go for simply what interests you the most. However, it is still always worth thinking about what type of thinking you wish to commit three or more years of your life to.
By Joel T, University of Oxford graduate, Mathematics & Science Tutor