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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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I went to university in the UK at Birmingham, in the days when university was not an automatic extension of school and before you could get degrees in origami and table decoration. That is before Thatcherism decided that every child should go to university and increased the number of insitutions beyond what even a reasonable person could imagine would be needed by any nation.
As a result, today, you need an MA in Janitorial Studies to be a Janitor.
However, I studied a rather naff but serious science subject.
I went with the motivation called "Go to university, young man". I was not brilliant, but was academic enough to have sat the Oxford scholarship and reached "Dismissed at interview2 stage. I had worked in a research lab in "my field" before going to university.
I found the course unutterably tedious, and the concept that I also had to take a course in English, in Physics, in Chemistry as part of the NUS's insistence that university education should be broader (I needed none of these), and to pass them a major demotivator.
I found the teaching banal in the extreme, the competence of the lecturers to be appalling, and the quality of the lab work to be execrable.
My tutor took no interest in tuting at all, no pastoral care, not even conversation.
In this environment, I, who was expected o get a first class honours degree, ended up with no degree at all.
I did, however, enjoy university life immensely.
I would say it was not entirely my "fault" though I had it in my power not to fail. Poor school advice, poor parental advice, and plain poor universoty departmental standards all let me get inti the mindset where it never seemed to matter.
As an end result I have spent my life struggling. But I think, as a metallurgist, for which there is limited demand, I would have struggled anyway.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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timmy wrote:
> (snip)
> I found the teaching banal in the extreme, the competence of the lecturers to be appalling, and the quality of the lab work to be execrable.
>
> My tutor took no interest in tuting at all, no pastoral care, not even conversation.
> (snip)
> I would say it was not entirely my "fault" though I had it in my power not to fail. Poor school advice, poor parental advice, and plain poor universoty departmental standards all let me get inti the mindset where it never seemed to matter.
>
timmy - almost everything you write goes exactly for my first time at Uni as well (UEA, 1973-5: dropped out after 2 years of a biological sciences course).
My second time at Uni was different - I was doing a decent course, parts of which I adored. But I got side-tracked into Ents & Student Union activities which I adored even more ... and ended up repeatedly failing an archaeology exam which was mandatory (so although I have enough credits for a degree, I don't actually have a degree). However, the experience I gained has been directly relevant to everything I've done thoughout my career.
And it was where I gained the courage to be and believe in myself: the courage to come out, the belief in myself that came from others recognising my achievements. Best of all, a University "laurel" - the non-sporting equivalent of sporting colours ... finally getting one up on my father (who always felt hard-done-by in that he had not been capped as a "Blue" at Oxford).
So, I didn't get a degree, out of six years at Uni. But I'd strongly say it was worthwhile: what I did get, and what Uni gave me that enabled me to achieve professional excellence, was a belief in myself and my ability.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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