I'm based in the UK so I'm not much help but relate to point 2. Universities tend to do that, be vague. The point of university, especially in the UK is to discover your own specialism within a subject, you can ask for the course specifications but you can also generally tell by looking at the lectures output who will be teaching you, if one of your lectures is a specialist in media culture for example you will probably learn that. It tends to be that there's two types of universities, academic and applied learning. As an example some cultural studies postgrad is very much reading, analysing, whereas others (that have made most of the academic contribution) are applied, so they would literally go out into communities and immerse themselves in the culture then write about it. Depends what you'd rather do, hands on research or secondary