Sam Jackson

Hi, I’m Sam! I’m a second-year Liberal Arts student here at the University of Birmingham. It’s an incredibly exciting degree, and the university experience in general has been equally phenomenal.

I started looking into liberal arts degrees when researching university courses because I was really passionate about a range of subjects, and wanted the opportunity to stay academically engaged with multiple things rather than completely specialising. In a rapidly growing selection of courses, UoB’s Liberal Arts course was by far the strongest for free range of module choices, not to mention interdisciplinarity-focused core modules to help with integration of several different subjects.

There’s an incredible range of modules to choose from, and it can be intimidating, but I would really recommend just getting stuck in! If you want to try out a module in an area you haven’t dealt with before, there’s enough support to make that jump to a new subject much more manageable. I tried philosophy modules in first year, not being sure if it was for me, and now I’m planning on focusing on philosophy specifically during my year abroad. You never know where it might take you!

The biggest piece of advice everyone gets is to make the most of university life, but the advice I would give is that doing that sometimes means not doing stuff. It’s easy to get caught up in everything happening all the time and get overwhelmed. There’s no shame in a quiet night in from time to time, and it’ll make the more social events way more enjoyable.

Birmingham is a fantastic city to explore, and Digbeth specifically has a lot of amazing spots. The Custard Factory there has an independent cinema with a ton of events, an arcade bar with laser tag and a board game cafe. It’s tempting to stay within the bubble of campus and accommodation, but there’s so much to see out in the city, it’s incredibly worthwhile to make the most of that.