Subject Guides by Faculty

Transcript

Helpful resources to use when researching subjects available at UTS are the Study Abroad and Exchange Subject Guides. These guides have been created by the Study Abroad and Exchange team, and they list subjects that are commonly taken by Study Abroad and Exchange students.

The first step for accessing these guides is to go to the Study Abroad and Exchange student page within the UTS website. The easiest way to do this is to go to your search engine and type “UTS Study Abroad or Exchange”. The correct website should be the first result that appears.

After you click on the site, you’ll need to navigate to the Subject and Academic Information section on the left-hand side. Once you click on this, you’ll see that the first drop-down on the page is called Study Abroad and Exchange Subject Guides. Within this drop-down, there are a variety of different subject areas. If you click on the hyperlinks, you’ll be directed to the subject guide for that subject area.

As mentioned, these guides list subjects that are commonly taken by Study Abroad and Exchange students. They don’t list all subjects available at UTS. For a full list of UTS subjects, you can refer to the UTS Handbook. We have a separate video about the UTS Handbook, so please refer to that video for more information.

For now though, let’s take a look at some of the popular subjects taken by Study Abroad and Exchange students. I’m going to click on the Communication Subject Guide as an example.

Now you’ll see that the first page of the guide gives you a key to the information that will be contained on later pages. The first thing to notice is the UTS session timelines. In this guide, ‘A’ represents Autumn and refers to the Australian Autumn. Autumn session at UTS is between February and June. ‘S’ represents Spring, and this refers to the Australian Spring. Spring session at UTS is between August and December. If you see an ‘A’ or an ‘S’ next to a subject, this refers to when the subject will be taught – in Autumn or in Spring. It is important to note that this could change depending on subject availability.

Another piece of information you will need to be aware of in order to read this guide is that different subjects are suitable for different stages in a student’s degree. This is denoted by levels. Level 1 means that the subject is usually undertaken in a student’s first year and that it is an introductory subject. Level 2 means that the subject is usually undertaken in the second year and that some prior knowledge is required. Level 3 means that the subject is usually undertaken in the third year and contains advanced material.

Now that you understand what the symbols in this guide mean, let’s take a look at the rest of the guide. It is important to pay attention to whether subjects listed on a page are undergraduate subjects or postgraduate subjects. As you can see, this page lists undergraduate subjects, and later in the guide there is a list of postgraduate subjects.

Many of the subject guides have subjects classified by themes. For example, if we look under the Journalism heading of the Communication Guide, we can see Communication subjects related to Journalism. Let’s have a look at one of the subjects. You can see here that one of the popular subjects taken by Study Abroad and Exchange students is titled “Stories from the Streets, Local Journalism, Social Media”. It has L1 and A next to it, which means that it is an introductory course typically available to UTS students in the Autumn session. The number in the left column refers to the subject code.

In regards to prerequisites, each guide lists these a little bit differently. You’ll see that on the Communication Guide, the asterisk symbol means that a subject has a prerequisite, but that the prerequisite is not specifically listed. If you open a different guide, such as the Health Guide, you will see that there is both an asterisk and a column listing the exact subject code that is required as a prerequisite. Either way, prerequisites for each subject can be found within the UTS Handbook. If you click on the subject code listed, you will be directed to the UTS Handbook entry for that subject.