DD wants to move university for the second time?!?!

[Bonnici]

DD went to Kings in London and disliked it, she dropped out after freshers and reapplied to universities and took a gap year.

Then she got into Cambridge, which we were all delighted as it was what she always wanted. She's just finished her first year there but now has dropped a bombshell.

She's applied for a transfer to UCL and has been accepted. She wants to go into second year there.

What the fuck do we say? I want her to feel supported but she just needs to get on with it. Plus UCL will take a hit for her employability?

A couple of points: yes, you can study Classics at Cambridge with neither classical language, but in practice that only applies to a small minority. Most will have A level Latin and many will have both.
The academic content of the Cambridge course is significantly higher. At UCL texts are studied essentially in translation whereas at Cambridge there is a greater philology all element.
Most UCL - not all, but most - undergraduates reading Classics will be Oxbridge rejects.
There are some wonderful people in the Classics faculty at UCL, but seminar groups etc are much much larger and the experience less personal.
No doubt whatsoever that Cambridge Classics is a more rigorous academic experience, but maybe that’s not what she’s after?

she's admit to feeling as if she's missing out on all the fun that London has to offer her youth

If this is her thinking, my advice would be this. Finish her degree at Cambridge with a view to getting a job in London after she graduates. With her Cambridge degree, her prospects will be very good - and she will have some money, which is necessary to enjoy what London offers her youth!

I had a friend at UCL. She had quite a good time - but it seemed rather more difficult than the Oxbridge college experience, where your room is laid on and subsidised. She was living in a shared house in Finsbury Park and a lot of her friends were in Southgate. Heck of a lot of trekking about on the tube to get to lectures, see friends. And with property prices now, presumably students live even further out.

One change? Fair enough. Anyone can make a wrong choice. But two - unless there are very obvious reasons - seems a bit flaky.

The Tube is an experience of seeing all of life in itself
UCL is among the top 10 unis in the world.

Agree, Jessie. I was at Oxbridge at the same time and Sloanes existed but not on a massive scale and it was perfectly easy to avoid anyone like that.

Having been at UCL recently, the academic pressure is far less and there is vastly more spoon-feeding, which might be seen as good or bad depending what you want.

But don't choose UCL without being aware of current real issues - the huge expansion in recent years has been very unpopular with the student body and UCL now scores low for student experience. I live in London and had no interest in joining in the student experience during my MA but would advise against UCL at undergraduate level personally.

www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universities/student-experience-survey-2017-best-uk-universities-academic-experience

UCL is at 101 - Oxford is at 2!

I was at Cambridge at the same time as you and you are talking shite with your “full of pissed Sloanes” comment..

What you mean is you disagree and that’s fine. You can’t say I’m talking ‘shite’ as I’m speaking from my personal experience. There were too many for my liking as I find them annoying. They may not bother other people. (Sloanes aren’t necessarily thick, don’t know where you got that idea.)

VelvetSpoon expressed her own experience at Peterhouse, is that ‘shite’ too?

What you’re really saying is you’re concerned that people from different types of background might be deterred from applying on the basis of that, but I’m not on a recruitment drive, nor is thread about encouraging state school applicants. It’s a valid concern but a completely different issue.

I’ve spoken to many people - including on here, who said they felt intimidated at Cambridge by the collegiate setting, the perceived social milieu, and the private school students who seemed to feel at home not only academically but socially.

My response was that actually state school students are in the majority, so there’s no reason to feel like that. But that’s not to invalidate how they felt.

I said before I think Cambridge has made a big effort to recruit more widely from state schools and to be more socially inclusive. I hope it continues.

I think which universities are involved is a red herring. The bigger issue seems to be her stickability - that she only gave Kings a week, and now wants to change again after a year because she thinks she'll have more fun in London.

Is she often very volatile, always thinking that something else will be better than what she's got?

Personally I wouldn't recommend uni in London. It's not like being a student; it's like living in London with no money! And god knows there's all the time in the world to do that after graduation.

All your friends live miles away, and lots of lovely people that you meet are foreign exchange students who want to be in London for a semester or a year but then go home, so you lose good friends regularly. It's expensive and you end up living in a shithole miles from anyone.

I ended up there after borking up my Oxford interview. I had a great time and made some good friends for life, but it simply wasn't the same experience that friends at oxbridge; bristol; Nottingham; Durham etc had. My best friend went to Nottingham and it sounded amazing. there's a huge group of about 40 of them who still have an annual ski trip, many years later. Although I wouldn't be without the friends I did make, if I had my time again, I would take a year out, reapply to Oxford, and if that failed, go somewhere more campus/college based.

The word sloane is such a weird term to use for posh students imo. Refers to posh young adults who used to hang around Sloane Square in the 80s - imo it doesn’t describe posh teens from outside London (who are very culturally different from London poshos), and doesnt really describe that many people in West/southwest London anymore. I’d call the posh types at oxbridge ‘rahs’ - and yeah there are a lot of them but not so many as at some other places (Bristol, Durham, maybe UCL).

I did classics at Cambridge and think you’d be mad to move from there to UCL. The quality of the faculty at cam is world class, almost everyone on the fac is a world leader, and the department is just a lot bigger than the UCL dept. Also there is a distinctive Cambridge approach, at least to literature - irreverent and postmodern- influenced, and I found it exciting to be part of an academic community that was genuinely innovative.

Rah is just the newer word for Sloane, which is a very dated phrase now because I’m quite old.

But no, it didn’t specifically refer to London Sloanes, many of whom had country pads anyway. It was just a generic term for conservative upper middle class/upper class. Country Sloanes, when they visited London, would gravitate to Kensington and Chelsea because that’s where they all hung out.

Hmm I think of rah as encompassing a lot more people than actual aristocratic types who have a country home and a London pied a terre. To be it describes a certain kind of sporty, confident, upper middle class kid, not just someone who actually hangs out in Chelsea. I mean there are lots of public school kids in Cambridge but only a minority of them are used to hanging out at Annabelles or something.

As I said Sloane was just a generic term for conservative upper middle class/upper class. I was trying to explain the genesis of the label.

How you define rah is a Sloane precisely.

I was at Cambridge and although there may have been "rahs" around, they didn't impinge on my life or the lives of my friends. I suspect they largely keep to within their own social circles.

I can see that she might feel like she is missing out on social life by not being in London, but the vast majority of my peers at Cambridge moved there after graduation and had many great years there going out and about on a graduate salary rather than a student budget. The students I knew who moved there and didn't live at home, found it cripplingly expensive and didn't get to enjoy the social life offered by London.

I understand that it may seem to her now that she is missing out by not being in London, but she has years to enjoy London when she leaves university. The rest of her life if she chooses. Cambridge will set her up well for her future and it really is a nice city to live and study in.