UK Unis Look Way More Fun

Yesterday I dropped a friend’s kid off at Uni in Norwich.   Seriously?  They have a student Union that serves all kinds of craft beer, a nightclub on campus and they start it off with a week long party called freshers week. They even had employed older students to help carry stuff to their rooms.

Compared to that, my Uni totally sucked.  You couldn’t drink a drop on campus and everyone was correspondingly miserable . 

Experiences?

Yesterday I dropped a friend’s kid off at Uni in Norwich.   Seriously?  They have a student Union that serves all kinds of craft beer, a nightclub on campus and they start it off with a week long party called freshers week. They even had employed older students to help carry stuff to their rooms.

Compared to that, my Uni totally sucked.  You couldn’t drink a drop on campus and everyone was correspondingly miserable . 

Experiences?

I imagine, if you went to Uni in the US, it's because the drinking age was 21 not 18 so they ban alcohol from dorms as a way to help curb underage drinking as best as they can.

Yep, UK unis are fun!

I went to Exeter for undergrad and we had several bars (usually a bar in each residence hall), a nightclub and lots of activities in Freshers Week . Dorms were mixed-sex... we had 11 girls and 5 guys on our floor, all sharing two toilets (in cubicles, so the guys had to put up with our sanitary bins), two baths and one shower. We had several 'floor' parties where everyone got drunk and hung out, and then each term there were formal dinners with lots of free wine. Society socials were all about drinking and clubbing.

We even had a 'Safer Sex Ball' in December each year, where you wore as little as possible and there were pole/cage dancers and themed rooms.

In my third year of uni I studied abroad in the US at the University of New Mexico... a dry campus. I was living in a dorm with mainly freshman and wow, was it boring. Girls and guys were separated by floor, with strictly girls and guys bathrooms. During orientation the 'free drinks' were Pepsi and there was a 'colouring competition' (colouring The Grinch) and the prize was either a girls-only or guys-only pizza party. Oh, and one of my British friends was caught with a beer in his on-campus apartment... he was sent to Substance Abuse Counselling, despite it just being one drink and he was 24!

After being a legal drinker in the UK for 2.5 years and having experienced UK uni life, it felt like I was back in primary school!


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Yep, UK unis are fun!

I went to Exeter for undergrad and we had several bars (usually a bar in each residence hall), a nightclub and lots of activities in Freshers Week . Dorms were mixed-sex... we had 11 girls and 5 guys on our floor, all sharing two toilets (in cubicles, so the guys had to put up with our sanitary bins), two baths and one shower. We had several 'floor' parties where everyone got drunk and hung out, and then each term there were formal dinners with lots of free wine. Society socials were all about drinking and clubbing.

We even had a 'Safer Sex Ball' in December each year, where you wore as little as possible and there were pole/cage dancers and themed rooms.

In my third year of uni I studied abroad in the US at the University of New Mexico... a dry campus. I was living in a dorm with mainly freshman and wow, was it boring. Girls and guys were separated by floor, with strictly girls and guys bathrooms. During orientation the 'free drinks' were Pepsi and there was a 'colouring competition' (colouring The Grinch) and the prize was either a girls-only or guys-only pizza party.

After being a legal drinker in the UK for 2.5 years and having experienced UK uni life, it felt like I was back in primary school!


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That is excellent! haha UK Uni always sounds amazing! My nephew has just started at Uni and so we were discussing freshers week etc. and apparently loads of people will register for the classes, enjoy freshers week, then drop out by the deadline where you get your money back (or something to that extent - basically attending for the initial parties and then dropping before consequences kick in).

All right Ksand, I am getting jealous now. 

My undergrad was fun but I didn't really attempt to drink there or want to until I was 21 anyway.  There was a bar on campus but members of the Coors family had gone to the university and sponsored a lot on campus so everything you could get was a Coors product.

My postgrad was here and it WAS fun.  I was too old for clubbing/freshers drunk nonsense, but welcome week was still awesome.  Lots of game and activity nights, a tour of the city, a pub crawl on campus (although the pubs on campus are pretty expensive)...it's when I met my husband as well so maybe I'm a bit biased!

I felt like the work you had to do in the US was a LOT more.  Maybe because you have to take a bunch of classes that aren't in your major, but I was up until 2 or 3 am most nights just doing homework.  For my UK course, which was a taught masters, I only had class 2x per week, and there were two book lists.  One, which was like 5 books long, was mandatory reading.  The recommended reading list was about 30 books long.  I managed to get through all of it and it later turned out I was the only one.  I worked Monday to Friday 9-6 on coursework (independently for all but 6 hours per week) and then was able to take most evenings and weekends off, instead of being up all night stressing over school.

All right Ksand, I am getting jealous now.

We should ask sonofasailor what he gets up to. Didn't he say he's studying at the moment? 

He told me he’s been jumping into the river Cam

He told me he’s been jumping into the river Cam

That looks a bit tame!  I had him down as a party animal. 

You're all so tame...  my memories of university involve flower bombing the student car park, dropping giant bags of water from 7 stories and then air gunning fellow drunken students staggering home at 3am, Molotov cocktail-ing my buddies room, shooting a guy in his junk with a bb gun for trying to piss through the letter box (bastard!), cling filming next door's toilet and polishing the black toilet seat, re-solidifying a wee beage jobby in some butter to retaliate against a break in from the guys next door. Most of that was the first two years as well!

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You're all so tame...  my memories of university involve flower bombing the student car park, dropping giant bags of water from 7 stories and then air gunning fellow drunken students staggering home at 3am, Molotov cocktail-ing my buddies room, shooting a guy in his junk with a bb gun for trying to piss through the letter box (bastard!), cling filming next door's toilet and polishing the black toilet seat, re-solidifying a wee beage jobby in some butter to retaliate against a break in from the guys next door. Most of that was the first two years as well!

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A fine example of why I object to all the brand-new, bright and shiny, all-mod-cons student apartments being built all over Glasgow!

A fine example of why I object to all the brand-new, bright and shiny, all-mod-cons student apartments being built all over Glasgow!

I could understand graduate students getting really nice new buildings, but I definitely would agree with objecting all the nice new stuff for undergrad because it's just going to get wrecked and won't even be noticed in the long run! lol

Oh, jeex, Glasgow dorms!   

The dorm the Daughter was in as an undergrad in Glasgow her last trip over was horrific. In an old brownstone tenement and owned by the University. Apparently a water pipe broke upstairs and water poured through the ceiling into their kitchen - and it was brown from having run through years of mouse crap. The housing office didn't send a professional cleaner or anything, just the usual ladies - a few days later - and the kitchen was completely out of commission for the better part of two weeks. The stove wasn't running for longer. There had been water streaming out of the light fixtures, too. There were 10 people sharing that one, with two toilets in the place.  The Daughter was only going to be there for a semester, and since all the other housing was full it was either that or one waaaay far from campus and she was stuck with it - besides, she signed the Uni housing contract from overseas and was legally bound to it.  And, of course, the flat-mates regularly trashed it when it was fixed. She says they managed to break the oven door... how do you break an oven door? And would leave the trash until the mice came for the buffet. And the one Chinese guy used to leave fish-guts in the sink all the time....

The housing where she stayed the first time she was over was run by a private group (Sanctuary) and was really quite nice, with extremely reliable and fast repairs. And she only had to share with six other students, most of whom were never there. Nice, private, and clean.

There is such a shortage of affordable housing for students that is of decent quality that they really do need to build some so that kids can rent their own places, not live in like a barracks situation where one or two can trash it and the rest have to suffer. Hopefully the new housing just opening will help with the problem. There are some really skeevy landlords here, and some truly awful flats that I'm surprised they can legally rent out.    So the private sector "multiple occupancy" flats are not always a good idea, especially for kids.

Oh, I had fun at Uni in the US. Worked hard at school (Engineering course load is insane!), and I worked 3 jobs (Deans Office, Beer Slinger/Concessions at a local sports arena, and the Bookstore for the discounts), played trombone in Marching Band and Concert Bands, partied hard (memories, memories, memories), and slept very little. 

I'm sure my liver has just now recovered (15 years later). 
I'm so glad that Facebook did not exist then!!!   

and I worked 3 jobs

I feel sorry for UK students these days... £9,000 per year in tuition, £5,000-£7,000 in accommodation fees, plus money for everything else, resulting in large loans and most likely needing to get a job during term-time.

I'm glad I went to uni when I did:
- tuition was only £1,100 a year (£550 for my year abroad in the US, thanks to the ERASMUS scheme), which my parents paid
- my hall accommodation was £2,800 per year (a room in the same accommodation now is £5,000+)
- my student loan was around £3,000/year which covered my accommodation
- my gran gave me £1,000 per year as a gift to help out with living costs
- I worked full-time during the vacations, which gave me around £2,000-3,000 each year... so I didn't need to get a job during term-time

My parents were able to put two of us kids through 8 years of university (4 years each) for just £7,700 total in tuition. Unfortunately when my youngest brother started uni, the fees had gone up to £3,000/year and my parents couldn't afford to pay his tuition for him, so he had to get the extra loans.

Then again, if I had started uni just 3 years earlier, my tuition would have been completely free, as tuition fees were only introduced in 1998.


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