University: The place that work forgot.

So it's 4pm... and i just got up, now i know what y'all are thinking: 'Typical student!' right? Well what if i told you that i was only asleep so long because i was at the library until 3;30 am? Yeah! Not so lazy now am i? Ahhh i'm only kidding, my post today is about University and the work it brings. Now for me personally since transferring from a science to a humanities subject, i'm not gonna lie, i have noticed a drop in work load. A 22 hour drop to be exact, going down to only 1 hour of lectures and 4 hours of seminars a week. It's an interesting fact that few people know but when doing a degree the first year in 90% of cases doesn't count towards the level of degree you come out with and sometimes even the second year has no bearing on what level you come out with either. It begs the question...why am i paying 9000 pounds a year if this doesn't even count? So the universities reckon that the first year is used to bring everyone up to the same standard, so my question to them is: Why the hell aren't A levels doing this? I slogged out my guts for two years learning chemistry and biology, only to come to university and sit down in my first weeks of lectures to a powerpoint presentation labelled 'The atom: a history' Now i'm not being funny, but i've known about the history and constituent parts of an atom since i was in year 9. Before even GCSE level science existed to me. So why the hell are there going to be people on a BIOLOGY degree course that don't even have a basic level of scientific knowledge?!? Crazy right?

I suppose it all really depends on what university you go to, i mean my university is a UCAS tarriff uni...meaning you don't have to have a certain grade (other than a pass), but rather must meet a total number of points with all your grades combined. A part of me likes this system because it means that you can earn extra points through other activities to pull up your total, so your work ethic is more of a factor, but the other side of me, the part that was sat in lectures learning what a proton is, really believes that students are not prepared well enough by A levels.

So as far as i can see the obvious solution is then to get the universities to set the A level syllabus right? WRONG! You can't do that because if you do it means that each individual student will have to decide which university they want to attend straight after receiving their GCSE results, and its bloody hard enough doing it mid A level, let alone anytime before that. 

A part of me loves the idea of American College (although it would suck being in high school until the age of 18 and having to carry all your subjects right through to graduating) the liberty of being able to pick both a minor and a major seems beautiful to someone like me who had such trouble deciding what they wanted to do. It seems a little insane asking a 14 year old to choose GCSE options which shape what you can do with your life. I mean if you asked me what i wanted to do at age 4 i could have told you with certainty that i wanted to be an archaeologist  then at age 13 i wanted to be a lawyer, at age 14 i wanted to be a forensic scientist, and finally settled on a biomedical scientist at age 17. All this led me onto studying biomedical science at university which i was doing until about a month ago, until one day i sat up in bed, realised i was miserable on my course and had the sudden feeling that for the last 2 years of being so focused on getting onto the course i thought was right for me, i had absolutely no bloody idea what i was doing. 

The crazy thing is, i did realise, and i feel like a part of me had always known, what it was i wanted to do, and so i transferred to studying English. I remember being sat across from the head of English and trying to explain to her why i wanted to leave biomedical science, a course i had been getting firsts in up until this point, and transfer to English, something seemingly alot... how can i put this... 'softer' and a million miles away from what i had been studying. She just smiled at me and listened to me rambling passionately before telling me that... and this is the crazy part, they were going to let me transfer immediately. It gets better, in the sense of the craziness increases, when she goes on to tell me that in fact i won't have to catch up on any of the first term as they will take the credits i gained in BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE and use them towards my ENGLISH degree! This is a perfect demonstration of how fucking pointless the first year at university is. I mean if it doesn't affect my degree if one sixth of it is made up of credits earned in a totally different subject how much can anything you do the first year really make any difference. 

For me personally i wish that they would condense university courses into 2 years, cut out the first year by better preparing everyone at A level and save us all approximately 15,000 a year in loans. Oh and actually give us some work, because for somebody who isn't the biggest fan of having to do work i'm actually finding myself bored out of my brain... hence why i am rambling like a crazy cat lady in this blog.

What do you think of the university system? Do you think you are getting your moneys worth? What is your work load like?
Lemme know!

Atargatis xxxx
p.s I'm thinking that next year when i'm writing a blog moaning about how much work i've got i will be looking back at this and laughing.