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Actuarial studies or electrical engineering? (2 Viewers)
- Thread starter Dauen Wu
- Start date
Do you do actuarial studies? If so, because it seems like you do, what subjects did you pick in year 11 & 12
pikachu975
Premium Member
Yr 11 I did biology, physics, english adv, studies of religion 1 (accelerated), 2u maths (accelerated), chem (dropped to SDD and dropped SDD year 12).
Year 12 I did bio, phys, 3u maths, 4u maths, eng adv.
Edit: Yea I do actuarial studies at mq
Yeah I want to go to MQ too but the ATAR required is like 97 lol
Was there a particular reason you picked bio and physics?
pikachu975
Premium Member
The year I got in had quite a few people lower than the cutoff but I think last year - 2019 - had a smaller cohort so they might have been stricter. Also I think MQ does direct offers where if you do really good in maths and (i’m assuming decent in english) you get an offer without using your atar
pikachu975
Premium Member
Well I really don’t like humanities because I liked science/maths stuff more and also our chem teacher was incompetent so I just went with bio and phys and ended up enjoying biology a lot bc I was interested in medicine and physics was decent but a lot of memorising.
Wow Biology and Physics. I'm thinking of doing the same for Year 12, but people are telling me it's an idiotic decision, it's either Bio and Chem or Phys and Chem. Obviously you got a good ATAR with doing that combo , any downsides for taking that?
Ahh I see, but following up on what SpiderX1X said people say that is also a bit of a weird combo to take since it is difficult to manage to subjects that require a ton of memorising and that will just put burden..
pikachu975
Premium Member
Tbh most subjects require a lot of work and memorising but it just depends how you study and if it’s effective etc. People always say bio has the most memorising but I enjoyed it so it felt like physics had the most memorising for me...
Nope not really, you can just pick whichever subjects you like and of course I had scaling in mind as well (but even without scaling I didn’t see any other appealing subjects). My friend @jazz519 did business studies with physics and chemistry so you can just pick whatever subjects depending on your circumstances!
What would you want to do in the future then? I always wanted to something in the science field, but nearly everyone says that its not really usefull as there are barely any jobs for it. The only other thing was research but like you said you need to be really high-performing.
Hey, so yeah most science graduates will have that issue of like what to do with the degree. There are options in terms of you can work in industry but for something like chem if you want to go into industry you are better off doing chemical engineering or industrial chemistry. You still do the main like subjects similar to a pure chemistry degree but you will also do more engineering based things that will be more applicable to the real world applications.
You do have to be high-performing for a research style career, but more importantly is will you be willing to basically in a sense dedicate your life to this kind of degree because its really rewarding to do if you are extremely set on becoming a scientist and know you want to do that, but if you are in like a limbo of do I want to research or not then it probably better to pair it with a double degree with something else.
This was my initial plan when I finished HSC to do a double degree of Advanced Science (Chemistry) and Chemical Engineering, so if I liked the engineering/industry aspect more than research I would have gone down that root. But I got like a scholarship that had a requirement of only doing the advanced science degree so I instead chose that (but I had in my brain if I didn't like the research then I would drop the scholarship after 1 or 2 years and do the engineering double degree. Luckily for me I liked research a lot).
For me I don't really have the problem of the high-performing aspect since you can see in my signature I have a few scholarships and also have ranked consistently first in my chem subjects at uni (in 2019 I ranked first in all 3 chem subjects and the overall ranking for everything). So my plans seem really ambitious.
I'm currently in 3rd year at the moment and finished a summer research project over the holidays and my supervisor is like a blessing! He is so supportive and offering of opportunities to me (I had him for one of the courses I ranked first) and he basically last week just offered me the opportunity to do my own research project as an undergrad student (which is unheard of, as you would normally just be helping some phd student out) this year. So this year hopefully while doing my normal uni studies I am aiming to publish a paper. So yeah I'm pretty set on wanting to do research. Plan is to do a PhD after this degree with that supervisor and then maybe one day be a professor (big goal but that's like my long-term goal)
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Heck no! If you have to resort to doing easy units to get your ATAR high enough to get into a course, you shouldn't be doing that course. Do stuff that's useful to your intended course. If you want to leave options open for electrical engineering and actuarial studies, go for Extension 2 maths, physics, and any computing, business studies or economics courses your school offers.