I realized I haven’t posted anything to describe my experience so far, aside from my initial reactions and a few videos on the places I’ve been to so far. So this week, I’ll try to post every day on a new topic. Up first, UCL vs. Pomona, teaching models and education systems.
I am going to admit a bad thing: I am not academically engaged at all. The rotating lecturers and less class time, from 20 hours a week with additional time doing research or working with the AARC, to only 8 hours of class a week, are the biggest factors. This translates to each lecturer trying to cram as much information as possible into the fifty-minute lecture. For each lecture, there’s no course work except suggested readings from a few journal articles, reviews, and textbooks. These textbooks are all in one place, at the science library, a great space to sit next to cute people, but overall stuffy, smelly, and science-y. But library aside, the hard thing about this is that each lecturer uses different textbooks, so if one lecturer suggests two textbooks, the next lecturer will suggest another two, making it difficult since the resources are not neatly compiled into one or two places.
Their system emphasizes the idea of independent learning and finding answers on your own, and while it’s ideologically sound, in practice it feels like lectures can be disjointed, repetitive, and as a whole, not well structured. Still, it makes sense since there are so many more students and not as many resources, and I guess this is what it feels like to be a large university. It’s actually nice to have less lab time, or practicals. There are only two to three practicals for the entire term for each neuroscience class, and because I’ve had two labs a week at Pomona for the past three years, the practicals are not comparable at all. In addition to lectures and practicals, there are also tutorials, which are like journal clubs, except you are graded on participation and it becomes an aggressive fight to see who will answer the most questions. I struggle the most with tutorials since the other UCL students have already taken two years of only neuroscience classes and seem to have good prior knowledge whereas I have only taken Neuro 101, which was more than a year ago. After high school, students specialize quickly, either with choosing their degree and only taking courses within that subject or with picking technical schools like medical, business, or engineering schools, meaning that they enter medical school right after high school and don’t have to go through general education requirements and the crisis of choosing a balanced schedule.
Thankfully, I’m not only taking neuroscience classes and my other two classes are easy. In fact, my favorite class is a London archaeology class since all we do is walk around old parts of London, and the professor is a cute old man who points out old city walls in car parks and grumbles at how nothing is preserved properly.
Overall, I’m much more appreciative and thankful of the amount of resources that Pomona offers. Of course, there’s a large difference in what we have to pay, since tuition at UCL is only 9000 pounds a year, which translates to $13,500, but doesn’t include room and board, compared to our $60,000+ with everything included. For that price, UCL is also considered one of the top schools in the UK, right after Cambridge and Oxford, and its biosciences/biomedical science programs are the best in Europe. So, while I feel like I may not be academically challenged right now, it’s probably because there’s no pressure for it, but once exam season comes around in about a month, I’ll start seeing why UCL is a tough school. With all that said, I’m glad I chose UCL, and I’m thankful for the opportunity to study here, even if it is only for one term.
notclaremont 