Issue 145

Anyone for a sandwich?

25th September 2006

The NUS Vice President for Education, Wes Streeting, has voiced his backing for sandwich courses which allow students to gain valuable work experience while they study.

Streeting stated that "gaining experience while studying can be vital to ensuring you can begin graduate life in your chosen career".

Students can study a 'thick sandwich' course which involves a year in industry or a 'thin sandwich' course, in which university study and work experience alternate throughout the course. Some salaries are offered for these, and can range from £10,000-£17,000.

Nezira Karodiam, a lecturer in Chemistry and a placement coordinator at Bradford University, says that placements have paid off. Karodiam believes that placements do help students with their final year of study and she goes on to say "students do get jobs from the company they did a placement with so it definitely opens up some doors".

Fearing that students will be put off from studying more traditional courses, many Universities are now fighting back, by no longer confining industrial placements to vocational degrees. More than 61 Law courses at various UK Universities now offer sandwich courses as well as 58 English and 40 Sociology courses.

Loughborough University states that 80c of Loughborough Engineering students who completed a sandwich year graduated with a degree result of 2:1 or better, compared with 43c of those who did not. Tom Hardy, a student in Forensic Science at Bradford University, was adamant that he wanted "to be one of a handful of graduates with experience applying for jobs rather than being one of thousands, all competing for very few jobs".

Jason Sannegadu