DESPERATE for vce subject selection advice 🙏🙏
Hi I’m a yr10 and I’m having trouble picking my VCE subjects for next year. I don’t really have a career pathway in mind, so if you have any suggestions (vce/careers) that would be helpful. Thank you!
I am planning on choosing 6 subjects and the ones I’ve decided on are: Chinese, Philosophy, methods and psychology. I’m unsure on:
Which
English to choose. Either Language or literature.
For my last, sixth subject, whether to do:
- Mainstream English (so two Englishes, lang/lit + mainstream)
- Maths spesh
(so two maths, spesh + methods)
I’m not bad at English and the yr10 English course I’m doing at school right now is like a miniature/pre-VCE literature class. I’ve had three assessments this year and gotten two “excellent”s and one “very good” (excellent is the highest rank apart from outstanding, which is extremely rare; very good is second highest). I asked my English teacher and she said I would “make a great lit student”. The problem is even though I enjoy reading and writing, I’m worried if I’m not interested in the texts we study in lit, I’ll get burnt out fast. I’m also aware of how heavy lit is as a subject with lots of contextual information I have to understand while analysing the text. I don’t read classics much, nor am I very interested in the idea of doing so. I’ve found English this year to be considerably stressful and overwhelming but I’m an over-thinker and my school’s curriculum is rigorous.
As for English language, I am interested in linguistics and how language is used differently depending on context, how language shapes meaning and how meaning/time shapes language. Such knowledge would also be useful in the future. However, I’m unsure about it because it sounds very rigid, with a lot of persuasives/expository pieces? Also, And lots of non-fiction texts to read, which I’m unfamiliar with. Basically, I’m scared it’ll be boring. But I’m also intrigued so…
The overarching problem for my English selection is that I feel equally-ish towards lang and lit and I don’t feel like one will be significantly easier for me than the other. I do love English, just not when my grades are at stake, and I’m passionate about reading, writing and the language in general. I would like to pursue a career related to English in some way but it sounds so unrealistic in this era, with AI becoming more and more prominent in our lives.
My maths grades are also decent. I spent my previous teenage years studying in China, doing the Chinese maths curriculum. My school sent us vce maths subject selection advice and mine said I can definitely do methods and I’m “encouraged” to do specialist. I am currently being tutored outside of school and pre-learning the methods content, which I’ve found alright so far. My tutor advises me to do spesh. I would like to do spesh but I’m also a bit scared. I like maths enough (on a scale from 1-10 I’d give maths a 7) to willingly do the work and be interested sometimes. However, I don’t see myself in a field in the future where all that spesh knowledge would be used.
I’m currently leaning more towards doing spesh and lang (so two maths, one English) because two englishes sounds like a really heavy workload to me. But all recommendations are welcome.
Sidenote: this year is my first year at an Australian high school, so everything for me has been quite rushed. Before I was in China for a few years but English is my first language. Do not think just because I spent my previous high school years in China my English isn’t good enough to do English language/lit. And no I don’t want to do English second language.