Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

It’s that time of year again where students have to make a decision about what they want to do with their lives after school. Many will choose to learn a trade or go to university. The big problem though is what to choose?

The choice is often talked about as one of the most important decisions of your life. In reality, it’s not. I studied Computer Science and Economics in University College Dublin. If you told me that I was going to work in Public Relations six years ago, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Life always has a funny habit of working itself out.

All the same, universities and trade bodies could go some way to form better channels of communications to attract good candidates, but more importantly, candidates suited to the course.

In Ireland the only real options to pursue when researching a course is to talk to your career guidance councillor, go to open days and talk to people in the profession you hope to end up in one day. A lot of the time that isn’t enough though. There is often a stark contrast between someone else’s perception on a topic and the reality.

I’m a good example. I choose Computer Science as a subject because there were plenty of jobs in the industry at the time, so it gave me a sense of security, and I thought I would be designing websites, learning Flash to make animations, etc. I was suddenly brought back to Earth when we were told we wouldn’t be doing any of that. For a truly comical moment, you should have seen the look on my face after spending an hour writing a program, only to have DOS prompt window to appear saying ‘Hello World.’

I really didn’t know what I was getting myself in for. This is the same reality that numerous students are facing today also. Despite what they think is a good choice, a lot of students will be unhappy at university because of their choice of subjects.

The Internet could play a powerful role in turning that around though. Some universities have already begun to offer audio downloads of lectures and it’s only a matter of time before they offer regular video content also. If you combine that with a website describing life on campus by using a blogging strategy, you could paint a much better picture of college life for applicants to use when making their final choice on further education.

My advice to people thinking about particular courses is try and sneak into a few lectures to see if it interests you. That isn’t an option for most people, but by making the content and experience available online, people will be able to form a much better impression of what to expect.

By allowing prospective students to come to a much better decision when deciding what course to pursue, universities will attract applicants more suited to courses thereby reducing the dropout rate and raising the calibre of graduates.

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