I live in Australia where if you study a particular degree, all (or the vast majority) of your subjects are directly related to that field.
I may be wrong but movies tend to give me the impression that at American universities/colleges, all students study a wide array of subjects, attend random lectures, and students room with people studying different things.
It also appears to be a lot about the lifestyle and not just get in, do your study, get your degree.
Are American studies specialised or more general?
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>Are American studies specialised or more general?
Depends on the college, the field of study, and to some extent, the person.
A typical university, for most degrees, will have significant General Education requirements. In your first year, you do some introductory field-specific classes, field-specific prerequisites (e.g., math classes if you’re a chemist), and a number of GenEd classes. Often GenEd and prereqs bleed into year two, but get less common. In years 3 and 4 it’s typically only field-specific classes and advanced related courses (e.g., more advanced math for a physicist).
Depending on the degree program, though, you often have a fair amount of “free space” to work with in the later years. You could do more classes within your field of study, but you could also branch out and do related things that are interesting to you. They could be just interesting or they could be both interesting and relevant. For example, maybe you’re a CS major, but you dedicate all your free time to art and sociology so that you have a particular perspective on UX.
At the far end of this spectrum, there is a liberal arts degree. That is really about studying a broad array of things and just being an educated person in general. There are also schools where you more or less invent your own degree program. You may think it’s weird, but historically, higher education is more aligned with liberal arts (general education) than with field-specific training. (By “historically”, I mean “before the US existed to be compared with”.)
>It also appears to be a lot about the lifestyle and not just get in, do your study, get your degree.
This kind of combines two things. There is the idea of “don’t just get in and do your study”. There’s a lot of disagreement about that. Many people think of and want college to be a training school for some disciplines, and they often approach it as “get in and get done”. Other people don’t, and favor the more traditional approach of using higher education as a way of being a more generally educated and well-rounded person. Separately, there is the non-academic “lifestyle”. Historically, college was also about the non-academic (and rather elite) lifestyle — but yeah, the “college lifestyle” is a big thing in the US.
>students room with people studying different things
Wait, you group students in dorms by their field of study?
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