Studying at Queen's

Today I had my first test here so I decided the time to finaly write about my studies came. I have to admit I was trying to avoid writting about studies at Queen's because so far I have very ambivalent attitude towards it. In a way, I have the best opportunity to enjoy my Erasmus stay. I am subscribed in 4 studying modules. I go to lectures only on Tuesday and Wednesday and I even don't have to be there. The rest of the week I have for so called independent study. That means I don't study. It is the worst way of motivation to do anything. Technically they gave me 5 days of week free. So as an Erasmus student, I will use them better. Like going outside, trying new kinds of cuisine, reading books I always wanted to read, learning new languages, I have the irish flute...

The level of education here is also not much motivating. I chose to go to Belfast because it's claimed to be one of the best univeristies in UK and in the world. I was also going to THE WEST. It probably made my expectations too high. But now I am only questioning myself, what are the criterias about "the best universites". One of official criterias is often openess to abroad workers and students. Check, they are opened. But does it show anything about the quality? Another criteria is amount of publications. Queen's is probably quite good at publishing papers. I don't know how it is at Bachelor's, but at Master's lot of things during whole studies is aimed at your field of study, your field of interest, your thesis. That's very useful. But is this really a criterium of a good university? Isn't it more about money which the university has to invest into research? Or isn't it at the expense of broader education? Especially when I don't percieve the knowledge of statistics and methodology is much deep here. I will cover this thoughts in more details in next post which I want to dedicate to approach to studying psychology at Queen's.

Another interesting thing is that higher education is really expensive in UK. And it is so obvious when you look around you. The people at lectures look so unified. They are nice, elegant, girls with make up, taking a lot of care about looks not only with face, clothes, but with figure too. I am used to very different, diverse and much more crazy people at university at home not only with their looks but also with their background, and with their thoughts and ideologies. Here I even don't know if people have some more deep thoughts because we never discuss it in the lectures, which is very important in psychology. When there is a discussion at lectures, we stay mostly at obvious things. The result doesn't go beyond, doesn't question anything which would make you think and discover the topic not only in literature, but in yourself. The approach to education is just very different here.

Another thing I've already mentioned before is that people here are living their routine, their every day lives at university. And if you are the only Erasmus student and the only one which is not native speaker, it is not much helpful to get into conversation or discussion and especially to get into some more closed group to go to cinema or even to discuss the studies. Because so far I am really not sure how to profit from local style or what is normal for them, how do they study and so on. It would help me so much just to hang out. So far I only managed to stop a converstaion on my classmate's facebook group :D. Still Irish people are really nice, smilling, when you ask them about something, they will gladly reply to you, but they doesn't seem to be much into really letting you in. I was hopping that czech people are different. But probably not so much. I imagined how group of my classmates changed when I switched to the Master's study program. There is a lot of new classmates who weren't with us at Bachelor's, but we logically stick to the groups we have already created in a way. And maybe I just can't see that, but it doesn't feel to me that we really took the new people in.

So the system here is different, some things are unbelievable for me, some others would be unbelievable for UK/Irish people if they would see czech lectures. Also there are really useful and good things in the approach here even though I am not much talking about them so far. Well, see in the next post. It takes some time to adjust to something different than you are used to from your home university. I miss lots of things from my education home, which I think is really great. And I still hope there is something which can really enrich me here. From some reason it is very hard to discover these things. But it is really getting better with time. I can see much more positive and useful things at Queen's with few weeks of education already passed. So lets just wait what I will discover.

Motto of the day: It can hapen the education style won't suit you at your new university. Be patient and find something you can still profit from. Different is often just different, not better or worse.