text: is easy to keep a part-time job at uni? i'm going to uni in october, and i was wondering whether people had found it easy to have a part-time job at uni, as i want to keep mine. how many hours should i do a week? thanks x x x it depends quite a lot on what sort of course you're doing.  if you're going into science or engineering you're likely to have 25+ hours contact time (time spent in lectures and classes/tutorials) and extra work and assignments on top of that. if you're doing arts or literature courses (e.g. english lit, history, politics etc) you'll probably have 4-8 hours contact time each week. language courses vary as to the amount of contact time but typical is about 15-20 hours a week.  if your timetable's not too busy it's pretty easy to keep a job, but: just because you don't have a lot of contact time doesn't mean you don't need to spend the time studying.  that being said, if your uni timetable is fairly empty, you'll find it much easier to find a part-time job in the daytime with hours you can work, and to organise your study time around your work commitments.  if you have a lot of contact time on your timetable, you will probably find it difficult to do all the work you're set.  if you're very intelligent this won't be a problem because you can just do the assessed coursework and skip the exercises.  if you're not a genius you may find it's very easy to fall behind and missing one or two exercises out can mean you don't understand half a term.  as a general rule i'd say don't commit yourself to doing more than 35 hours a week total, that is, your work hours added to your timetabled classes.  more than that and you won't have time to do the extra study you'll need to in order to keep up with your studies, or you'll end up frazzled, depressed and stressed, which is not what student life is about.  you should also bear in mind that most people head off to university with the intention of working while they're there and then discover that student life is for sitting in pubs... most people i know who've set out with good intentions have decided to borrow more money so they can take things a bit easier and drink more.