Alex Lynham

I chose Manchester because I grew up near London and my favourite band - Oceansize - were from here. It seemed like more of an adventure.

Essay writing and deadlines look suspiciously similar to the deadlines and word-counts I have to deal with today, but the biggest two things are the dissertation and free time. A dissertation shows you can put in a piece of major project work off your own back, and having only a few hours of lectures a week  gives you plenty of time to pursue other things.

I think I wrote something north of two hundred articles in my final year, which I'd be hard pressed to do around my job now. There's also the people you meet - three of the friends I made outside of my course became programmers and helped me to learn once we'd all graduated. 

I suppose analytical reasoning helps when debugging and the like - but I'd almost say that's more of a life skill; being able to see the spin behind a news story is more important on a day-to-day basis. Writing swiftly and precisely is important for coding and prose.

Around my degree I did a lot of things both around the Union and outside of it. I was founding chair of a charity record label and a member of more societies than I can remember - a lot of my enduring friends were made in that building. A group of us founded a separate record label which we still run, and the experience from that helped many of us get our first jobs.

As a part of this we did several radio shows on Fuse FM and continued a podcast afterward - through this and a bit of networking I landed an internship at internet radio platform Mixcloud after graduation which both gave me my first taste of tech and helped me get my first job after returning to Manchester that autumn. When I quit that job to retrain, the guys I started the label with (by that time all programmers professionally) helped me along the path.  

A lot of employers care more about where you went to University than what you studied. If you enjoy History then do a History degree because you will get things from the course and you will get transferrable skills and plenty of time to work out what you want to do.