‘It is vital to our economy and to the country’s prosperity that we maintain and develop our science base’ (DfES 2006: 3). This sentence from a recent report into the UK government’s strategy for increasing participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects underlines one of the fundamental concerns of policymakers, employers and educators: namely that science and technology are central to a nation’s economic performance (also OECD 2004). In the UK one consequence of this science agenda is that more science is now being taught to more students at school than at any time in history (Jenkins and Donnelly 2006). However, falling entries to Physical and Engineering Science degrees plus recent closures of several university science and mathematics departments, appear to suggest a crisis in education and training in the sciences (Roberts 2002, CBI 2008). This ‘crisis account’ is not limited to the UK, in Europe we are told that young people are losing interest in scientific studies (Convert 2005, Haas 2005), in the US that students are lagging behind their international peers in mathematics and science (New York Times 2007) and that internationally only a minority of young people want to become professional scientists (OECD 2007). Traditionally, the focus of reform of scientific education and training is the school (Jenkins and Donnelly 2006, QCA 2005). Research projects like the international Relevance of Science Education study (Jenkins and Nelson 2005) provide us with important insights into what young people enjoy about science and their reasons for choosing, or not choosing, to become scientists in later life. However, much less attention has been devoted to the undergraduate student experience and the trajectory that learners take which lead to careers as professional scientists and technicians (Institute of Physics 2007). What research that has taken place has painted a rather negative picture of the experiences of undergraduate scientists. For example, Seymour and Hewitt’s (1997) US study into attrition among several hundred science undergraduates in seven universities provides a useful insight into the reasons why students drop out from Science courses in disproportionate numbers: many of which focus on poor teaching, an overly competitive and crammed curriculum, inapproachable faculty and the perception of poor career prospects in the sciences. In this project we consider two main Research Questions: •What are the views of undergraduate STEM students concerning their participation in the field? •How do these views compare with learners in non-science fields?

This paper presents the results from ongoing research into the experiences and aspirations of around 350 final year Chemistry and Physics undergraduates studying at four British Higher Education Institutions. We explore the reasons students give for choosing to study for a science degree, their expectations and experiences of their course and the ways in which these have influenced their choice of career. For purposes of comparison, we also consider the experiences and aspirations of around 350 final year Historians and Linguists from the same institutions. The first phase of this research involved a short questionnaire which was administered to undergraduates during core lectures. This was followed by group interviews with a self-selected group of science and non-science students at two of the four institutions. The institutions selected for inclusion in this study were all research active, pre-1992 institutions which attracted students with similar prior attainment grades.

Science undergraduates in our study showed a much stronger identification with their subject than the humanities subject students; 18% of Chemistry students and 38% of Physics students in the survey strongly agreed with the statement ‘I like to think of myself as a scientist’. No History students and just 4% of Linguists strongly agreed with their discipline’s equivalent statement. We conjecture that this strong subject identification may play some part in the retention of science undergraduates, who reported the transition from studying at school to university to be challenging, with 61% of Chemistry students and 67% of Physics students agreeing this was so.