BA? wow, that's easy!

I'm going to write about something a bit different from my normal alcohol related stuff, an opinion piece about BA and Bjourn subjects. So feel free to join the debate and leave a comment =)

There have been so many countless times that someone asked me what I’m studying, and when I reply, “Bjourn”, the reaction is immediately negative towards my degree. Mostly I get people saying, “Oh, so you’re a BA-student! That’s so unfair because that’s an easy degree!” as I was once told by one of my friends, Gregory Viljoen. I would like to hereby give an argument correcting this perception of BA and Bjourn degrees.
All the subjects at Rhodes are difficult, some might be a bit easier than others but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy. We are all here to learn about new things so most of the things we learn in university are totally different to the things we studied in school. Therefore, logically, it would make sense that university must be harder than school.
Journalism and Media Studies (JMS) aren’t always appreciated by others outside the Journalism Department. Every time I tell someone that I do journalism, they just say “oh, another journalism student” and laughs it off. But it’s difficult being a journalism student. Try competing with the rest of your class for one of 120 spots. Yes, only 120 students get places in JMS2. Now that’s hard! To eat, sleep and breathe journalism the whole year, even in the holidays, just so you can show the Journalism Department that you really, really want to be a journalist and that you deserve to get into JMS2. It’s a lot more work than you might think it is and you really have to have good journalistic skills along with excellent writing skills. On the department-website they explain how a Bjourn works if you don’t believe me. (http://www.ru.ac.za/jms/degreesanddiplomas/bjourn)
I don’t have experience in a lot of subjects but I do know that there are students that think languages are the easiest way out. “Wow, you got it off easy doing languages,” Greg Viljoen told me once after our conversation about my subjects. And later this year when I complained about writing a French test the same person said to me, “You’ve been doing French the whole year, you must speak it fluently by now!” Now this bothers me a lot because I’ve been doing French for the whole year but that doesn’t mean I’m fluent in it! There are so many aspects of a language you must learn to understand and it takes years to fully understand it. There’s still things you can learn from you home language even though you spoke your first words in it. French for example, has different genders for different words. Some words are feminine and some words are masculine (I know that German has that as well). It’s really difficult if you come to think of it. Just try and research French on the internet and see for yourself! (http://french.about.com/library/weekly/bl-gender-m.htm)
Another one of my friends, Jessica Marais, told me that I’m lucky doing Afrikaans- Netherlandic Studies because it must be one of the easiest subjects. (http://www.fourhensandacock.blogspot.com/) But there’s actually a lot more to it. You have to learn the theory behind writing and narrative and it’s really difficult to understand some of these things sometimes.
So before you criticise other subjects again, remember that this is Rhodes University. Everything is difficult otherwise it wouldn’t have been called a university!