Why Choose What?

This is a chance to pick subjects that you’ll enjoy doing. Maybe it’s a subject you’ve liked in first and second year, or a new one that you think you’ll enjoy learning about. It’s pretty likely that the more you enjoy a subject, the better you’ll do in it.

Play to your strengths. You want to do the best you can. In the next couple of years you’ll have to start taking exams that could have a big impact on the path you take after school. So it makes sense to focus on the subjects you think you can do well in.

If you already have some career ideas, think about what subjects suit those careers best. Try our Job Matcher and see which jobs match your favourite subjects. The subjects you choose now could open the door to the career you want after school, so think hard about how different subjects might match your interests.

This is important. It might seem like early days to be thinking about what you’ll do after school but the choices you make now could have an effect.

Today, lots of jobs require you to have completed a higher education course at college or university. To get in to college and university, you need to have gained certain qualifications in your National and Higher exams at school. These are called entry requirements.

What you maybe don’t know is that, for lots of courses at college and especially at university, you’ll need to have taken Highers in one or more specific subjects.

The last thing you want is to get to the end of S6 and discover that you don’t have the subjects needed to get into the higher education course you want. That’s why we’ve come up with the Subject Chooser. If you have a career or a course in mind, enter it into the Chooser and we’ll tell you if there’s any subjects you need to take at school in order to access it. We'll also recommend other subjects that would suit your plans well.

If you know the route you might take after school, it’s really important that you choose the subjects that fit that path now. That way, you’ll be heading in the right direction.

Most people aren’t totally certain what they want to do after school until they’re a bit older. If that’s the case with you, then the best idea is to keep your options open.

Think about the subjects you’ll enjoy most and can do well in, and try and choose a spread that covers different areas, like languages, social studies, science, and arts.

You might not be able to cover them all but find a balance that suits you. Taking a spread of subjects shows that your strengths lie in more than one place…and that’s a good thing.