A Universal Education

There is a tendency to preconceive your university life as unravelling in a pattern of, to borrow a phrase from David Guetta, “work hard, play hard.” You imagine an existence where your life is completely categorised and designated into separate areas. During the days of the week you will spend hours in the library, trawling through dusty books, tackling complex mathematical problems, honing your ideas on some of the biggest problems in the world; during the evening you’ll be found four vodka Red Bulls down, lying on the stairs of Neon, trying to find your way back to the dancefloor.

However, university education comes not just in the form of lectures, notes, and exams. It comes in the form of learning to look after yourself, to organise your own life, and to generally be an adult human being rather than the precocious teenager you’ve enjoyed being for the last five years.

So you’ll learn as much by simply talking to the many other intelligent people around you as you will from studiously reading everything placed on your syllabus and making detailed notes on it. After all, one of the best methods of learning material the university has to offer is the seminar; essentially, an hour where you sit and discuss that week’s topic with the others in your group. And you’ll soon discover that if you engage in that situation, you’ll find you know and understand more about what your are learning than you realised before you walked in the room.

University education […] comes in the form of learning to look after youself […] to generally be an adult human being rather than the precocious teenager you’ve enjoyed being for the last five years.

Seminars work best when everyone is open and willing to talk but often, in an educational environment, with an imposing tutor monitoring the course of discussion people are not. However, take a group of people and find them in the Dirty Duck that evening, with a few drinks down them, and they’ll be offering new theories on Ulysses, reanalysing the fall of the Roman Empire, and providing a Grand Unified Theory of Everything while they’re at it. This isn’t to encourage you to run off, down a four pack of Special Brew, and set to work on your dissertation – it is the principle that matters.

When people are relaxed, and not self-conscious, they will more openly offer opinions or ideas that they are not entirely confident about but which can stimulate great discussion – discussion that can only be made more interesting when you have a diverse mix of people. So try not to saddle yourself with the idea that you will learn in one environment and relax in another; the whole three years are your education. You should aim to leave university, not with just a degree, but with the confidence that your are prepared for the real world.

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Header image courtesy of Warwick Media Library