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Higher education
University life for freshers (2019/20) - we're hopping towards Easter with a pandemic to avoid **Title edited by MNHQ**
NewModelArmyMayhem18 · 19/02/2020 19:28
@Benjispruce I had the same.
I had 3 cross children. One because she did have snow and two because they didn't. 
Piggywaspushed they check attendance at lectures and seminars at DD's university. While attending lectures isn't compulsory, anyone who has missed a lot of lectures gets checked on from a student wellbeing point of view.
I agree it is very difficult to feel engaged in a dry and boring subject. I hated economics as a student and could never do more than scrape through, and to this day I cannot understand why anyone would choose economics or politics as a degree
@Ginfordinner
You're going to get very different attitudes as well as different degrees.
I remember when I was going off to uni, one of my friends was going off to a "new uni" to do American Studies. We were talking about what we'd been told to expect:
Me: "We have 10 hours of lectures and 2 hours of tutorials a week, and we'll be given work for those to hand in".
Her: "We have our first tutorial in 6th week and he'll set us our essay of the term then. I think there are 2 lectures a week, but they're not compulsory and most of the second years say they only went to the first one."
I saw her just after the second year and she told me that "there wasn't as much work as she'd been led to believe".
But also you have attitudes to work. I can 100% guarantee that if dd1 and dd2 did exactly the same course you would think dd1's was overloading them with work, and dd2's wasn't giving them any.
I wasn't particularly a hard worker. I did what was needed, and did fine.
But I did know people who would have been holed up in the library 8am-9pm with only breaks for contact times and meals. Some of them did way better than me, some of them didn't.
DD1 has found it a challenge. She did say that although her contact hours haven't decreased, she's finding the work this term easier to manage. I think she's finding she understands it better which helps.
But I was a bit shocked at the amount of contact hours she has (both her and me were maths)
I had 10 lectures (2 a day) and 2 tutorials a week through first year, and we had to complete a computer project on the lovely computer language "Maple", which I think took one afternoon a week for a term.
She has a couple of days where she's pretty much in lectures 9am-4pm (6pm on one day) and the other days aren't much better. I rarely worked much in the evenings (except one evening a week-the one before the main tutorial where all the mathmos would club together and work until we'd finished) and almost never at weekends whereas she only has the evening/weekends to do the work for tutorials. Then she's had projects on top of that.
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@Ginfordinner
It's difficult isn't it? For a child who isn't majorly into socialising, nor has an interest that brings them out, often feels that everyone else is rushing round going out all the time and they're not welcome. Fact is not all students are rushing out to the pub on Friday/Saturday night-but the vocal ones often are, and the silence in halls "confirms" that they're the "only one left".
I don't know how that can be helped.
But I think technology/social media does help and hinder.
Help in that they can message friends from home, so don't feel alone.
Hinder in that they can message friends at home and so don't feel the need to make friends at the beginning. But those friends move on, plus are only virtual friends during term time, so the person can get more and more isolated.
I remember a friend talking about how her son hadn't really made friends at college, wasn't really interested in doing things there. I asked if he was doing any societies, and she said. "Oh, he doesn't want to do things in the evenings, because some of his home friends work, so the only time they can message is the evenings, and he doesn't want to miss that."
He didn't feel the need to make friends at college at first, because he still had the friends at home.
Problem came when he realised that he did want friends at college and found that they'd all made friends, and did things together, and it was much harder to break into these groups that start at the beginning.
When I was at college and the only thing we really had was snail mail for home friends, people were much more forced into joining in.
Maybe unis could look to doing something along the lines of online groups called something like "I don't want to go out on Friday Evening" with the idea being that anyone in can chat on those, and maybe a couple of meet ups a term. That way they could at least see that they're not alone, and perhaps meet like-minded people.
Both of mine are at “top tier” RG unis. Both doing humanities subjects. Both have max 8hrs contact time a week but are expected to do a lot of reading and have essays to hand in. Neither seems to have had any tutorials (though DD now meets with diss tutor) and both say the lectures are a bit useless as just an intro to the subject matter 
DD studies in the library, DS prefers his room atm.
I think they both find getting high marks for essays does require quite a bit of effort!
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