CAO offers and choices

My son has been offered a Industiral Chemistry Course in Limerick Uni, wasn't 1st choice. He wanted Physio and is talking about repeating. He got 480 points but physio requires something like 580 and I feel that repeating may not get him the required points.

Should I let him repeat?
Encourage him to take his offer and maybe have to listen to him moaning about bad career choices.

Anyone know what the course is like or who we could talk to and more importantly the future jobs prospects?

We have available accomodation in Limerick so this is another cosideration but not vital.

Are you sure physio is 580 points? It might be worth finding out what the points are exactly...although they may change next year.
It's not unheard of for students to gain 100 points by repeating. It all depends on your son. Did he kill himself to get 480? If so...then maybe it's worthwhile looking at other options. If he's capable of working a lot harder then I'd say you shouldn't discount it. This decision may well affect the rest of his life. Don't mean to sound so dramatic about it but I guess it depends on how badly he wants to do physio.

It's a fair jump from physio to industrial chemistry. I work on the periphery of industrial petro chemicals industry and as far as I can see the best jobs in this industry are by technical guys with a flair for sales/business. The people in the lab do ok, but the ones who can talk the talk; both to buyers and on a serious technical level with engineers in large/important companies are the ones with who make the big bucks.

Clearly there is more to life than money and the labcoats could be ten times happier than the suits, but industrial chemistry is fairly specialised field and if he is doing a course as a "second best" it might make more sense to do something more general at this stage,which allows him to tailor his education as he figures out a real alternative to physio (or indeed an alternative route to physio). Its probably too late to change his course options now, but it might be worth considering his diploma/cert options (or UCAS if he applied) which could be more flexible. If he holds off to repeat, some of the last college places to be filled get adverstised in the papers and if I remember right, many of these tend to be science-related courses and might offer another option to him.

Best of luck to him and for what its worth, let him take his time; there's no panic. If he repeats, then in a worse case scenario, is he's back to a position similar to this, but a little older, wiser and more self-aware and probably better able to make a decision that is right for him.

Rebecca

more info required

Firstly, thanks for your replies - I should have stated that one of his choices was the chemistry course. However he has decided to take the offer. I think we are all happy.

Just in case what is the position with swapping courses next year?

What is the employment opportunties with Industrial Chemistry?

Is ther eanywhere we could get more info on the course content and job prospects?

Anything else we should consider?

Re: more info required

For a start you could try ringing the college/uni and asking about specific course content and what kind of work he'd be likely to get afterwards.

I did Google search which showed up some promising results.