What is uni commerce like? (1 Viewer)

[malcolm21]

What do you do in it exactly? Write 50 page reports? Examine statistics or?

 

[obliviousninja]

No. No.

 

[obliviousninja]

There are various streams within commerce so it differs. And within these streams are a multitude of subjects.

 

[malcolm21]

Any other insights?

 

[Amundies]

You have to be more specific lol. Commerce is so, so broad.

 

[Crobat]

You won't have to write 50 page reports, but for some qualitative content intense subjects like Management you will need to write essays in the vicinity of 2,000 words. You will mostly analyse statistics in the subject of Statistics, but given its importance you'll come across it in pretty much every stream of Commerce.

It's really difficult to provide with pinpoint accuracy a description of what Commerce is like. Generally you'll probably find it interesting in that you will be able to tell it is directly useful knowledge, relateable to the function of businesses, e.g. it is easy to see how Accounting fits into a Business's overall operation, but also boring in that much of the subjects are textbook-reliant and you don't get to think critically or "outside of the box" as much (this is something you'd do more in Management or Marketing).

Generally though, it is a degree where the more time and effort you put into studying your textbooks, the better your results will be. The majority of your homework/exams are practise questions and problem questions, as usually in exams you will be given a hypothetical scenario and apply your knowledge of the material learnt to that hypothetical (so this is very much like how high school Math functions I would say, having not done Business Studies or Economics in high school).

By your second semester you'll be able to see pretty clearly that Commerce is very much a "same shit, different calculations" degree.

tl;dr: What you will do exactly in it is learn the relevant calculations and what they do for each respective subject, practise them through your homework and tutorial work, and be examined on them through hypothetical business scenarios (usually). It's virtually only in Management (and generally qualitative content based subjects) that you will be required to write essays/reports, and they will likely never be near 50 pages length.

 

[RishBonjour99]

Any other insights?

Commerce is far too broad to string any meaningful common experiences that different disciplines or majors will bring (coursework wise). I can speak for Finance (and Accounting - did junior units).

Reports are very important and will be what you produce when you start working in the field. Typically, report assessments at university will be of two types - you will either be told to research something and analyse it OR you will be given a data set and a produce a report with your analysis/recommendations etc. What you will not be asked to do is 'Write a 2000 word report on the causes and effects of GFC/some event'. While typically the reports range from 1000-2000 words, the longest report I had to do was a 12 page one for Corp Finc 1 (5800 words ish + diagrams, tables etc). Here, we were basically asked to pick any ASX200 stock and using the models we were taught - value it. The key to the assignment was not to fudge the actual stock price using the primitive/plebe things we were learning, but to ask 'why is my output different to the market?' (This was not in the question but any proficient student wouldn't deny the fact that better models exist). If you did that properly, you could expect a HD. That is, you have to put thought into most things you are doing.

So if you imagine thoughtless reports being produced looking at Wikipedia and a couple of journal articles, that would be inaccurate.

 

[enoilgam]

What do you do in it exactly? Write 50 page reports? Examine statistics or?

As said previously, it depends on the major. People have already gone into detail on finance/accounting/economics/statistics, so I'll try to go into detail on the more humanities based areas (marketing, management, HR etc). Most of these are written based courses, so expect to write a lot of essays and reports. The essays are usually analytical, so you may have to discuss a certain topic (i.e "Discuss the impact of social media on marketing" etc). For marketing, you may have to put marketing plans together, which do require significant thought and time, as you have to develop a working strategy for a fictional business (these are usually 5,000 words each).

I did a HR major and the biggest assignments I did were for Change Management (10,000 word change management report) and HR Policy. For Change, we had to write a complete change plan for a business, which involved doing a statistical analysis, identifying areas of inefficiency and making recommendations. That was pretty difficult because everything had to tie together and you had to apply models of change etc. Although it was pretty relevant, because my first task in my current job was to compose a Change Management Implementation Plan. For HR Policy, we had to write a Policy Manual for a fictional business using several templates. Mine was about 22,000 words, but it was more time consuming than difficult.

Personally, I didnt find Commerce to be too difficult, especially in comparison to something like Law. If you keep on top of the work, then you should be fine. Also, I didnt find what we learned to be very useful - uni tends to be very theoretical and HR is really the kind of profession which you need to learn on the job. That being said, if you were intent on studying HR, then I'd recommend ACU or UWS because they have to most applied programs. USyd and UTS are probably the worst because of how theory based their HR majors tend to be.

 

[seremify007]

I think 50 page reports is something more for a large group assignment or a thesis! Most of the assignments I had which were not group, were very strict on word/page limits (typically 3-4 pages max). As others have mentioned it depends what you plan to specialise/major in, but for what it's worth, I feel the Commerce degree does not involve such extensive contact hours relative to other fields because you can teach yourself from the book (for the most part), and the real value that you get from the degree isn't the technical knowledge but the softer skills gained either through the group work/tutorial element, or with the capacity you have, other activities (either paid or unpaid).

 

[malcolm21]

I thought you just pick commerce like it's a degree in itself. I had no idea, so you have to pick one specific 'major', like management or finance, or am I still clueless?

 

[obliviousninja]

I thought you just pick commerce like it's a degree in itself. I had no idea, so you have to pick one specific 'major', like management or finance, or am I still clueless?

Haha yea

 

[seremify007]

You pick a degree (e.g. Commerce) and then pick specific areas to specialise in. There are some subjects which are core to Commerce regardless of what your majors/specialisation is (e.g. basic accounting, statistics, finance, etc) but then you branch out.