Diary of a Third Year: What am I going to do with my history degree ... frame it?

I spend more time defending my degree than I do studying it. Whenever I tell someone outside university that I'm taking history, they look puzzled, suppress a giggle, and ask "Why?" No one asks engineers or medics why they take their subjects. But then I suppose they're not stuck with a degree that gives few, if any, direct career opportunities.

People assume I'm deranged (or just a bit simple) when I mumble my reason for studying history: I enjoy it. I like reading and writing about history. Basically, I'm doing a hobby degree. "But what will you do with a history degree when you graduate?" is often the next question. I ignore the temptation to answer "Frame it", and give a sensible reply. "Gordon Brown did history; I could follow in his successful footsteps."

Students are just as bad. There's a strict hierarchy at university when it comes to the degree you're studying. Top of the pile are subjects like medicine and engineering, the type of degrees that parents like to boast loudly about their children studying. ("Yes, Jamie's doing dentistry up at Newcastle. He'll be on 40 grand a year before he's 25!")

Next come the sciences: maths and physics, with chemistry and biology for the more socially able. No one looks down on the wannabe architects and lawyers or language students. Arts students, however, are at the bottom of the heap.

Maybe the reason is that we have the fewest contact hours of any subject and are therefore regarded as the laziest students, the ones who give the rest a bad name. I try to defend this, explaining that I have a lot of reading to do and a lot of essays to hand in. This excuse has never really cut it with my medic friends, particularly when they're doing ward rounds at 7.15am. It's also been fatally undermined by my workload this term. There really is very little of it.

Between now and Christmas, I am expected to do two essays, two short presentations and a book review. That's it. No exams, not until June next year, anyway, when I have a grand total of three. There is an intimidating reading list, but when there's so little else to do, it seems much less of a mountain to climb. Even sociology students have more work than me, which is a depressing thought.

Even more depressing is the idea that everyone who mocks my degree is right on some level. My history degree will not be much help when I join all the other arts graduates at the Jobcentre next year. If I manage to find a job when I graduate (a big 'if'), I will almost certainly earn less than my peers doing law, engineering and medicine. To top it off, history students probably are the idlest of the lot. My degree does require less work than many other subjects. It's upsetting but at least I enjoy it.