BF2S Forums College discussion thread

I was rather upset the first time I visited a university campus and it didn't look like the typical ones you see in movies.

RTHKI wrote:

whats typical

'typical' aka traditional - collegiate, classical/historical, campus or town based. ivy walls, ornate buildings, grass quadrangles.

ivy league, oxbridge, ancients, 'redbricks'. that's what you'd call typical universities i guess.

this is a pretty definitive list, imo.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/ex … me=2312111

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-05-02 20:46:10)

Uzique The Lesser wrote:

RTHKI wrote:

whats typical

'typical' aka traditional - collegiate, classical/historical, campus or town based. ivy walls, ornate buildings, grass quadrangles.

ivy league, oxbridge, ancients, 'redbricks'. that's what you'd call typical universities i guess.

this is a pretty definitive list, imo.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/ex … me=2312111

made da list woooooo

Cybargs wrote:

Nice hive.

Cybargs wrote:

U syd has very british designs and shit, buildings look nice and all but food court and student life there is shit.

uni. sydney was just based as a straight colonial copy of oxbridge, really. just like most of the ivy league schools in the american north-east all ape european/british styles, i.e. gothic revival or neoclassical.

they're the same style for predominantly 2 reasons:

1) they come from the same historical period - which generally tend to correlate with academic quality. you generally (though not always) find that the very oldest institutions are the most prestigious, the most established, the most traditional... the most highly ranked. so you've got the 'ancients', the very old european medieval ones, and then you've got the new england colonial ivy league. then you've got the next era of university building, which is mostly late 18th and 19th century. these are called 'redbricks', mostly cause the victorian style was red-brick and ornate.

2) they are new universities that want to imitate the style of the old unis, and hence their 'traditional' and hence their 'elite' status. see the example of the new yale colleges built that were purposefully "aged" with acid wash, in order to look more old-fashioned so yeah, you tend to get a homogeneous architectural style. that's what desertfox was talking about when he said a "typical" university, i guess.

and almost every nationally-leading university will have some sort of partnership with oxbridge/harvard-yale. think of the rhodes.

i'm not entirely familiar with the foreign student tuition options. i know that the US of A generally has a lot more money to throw around, on account of most of their best institutions being private, than the UK ones do. postgraduate funding in the UK at the moment is currently in a dire state, on account, in its own way, of being politically slashed in the face of 'the recession'. getting funding is difficult, even for domestic applicants. i know there has been plenty of jeremiad moaning in the press and within academia about how postgraduate options are dead, and how we are now failing to capitalize on an international appeal, because we're essentially constricting our access/offers.

with that said, i really don't know if the international scholarships are plentiful or not. and with that said, i know the funding situation in the sciences is much better than in other areas of academia, currently. so: small mercies, i guess. if you are intending to do "seriously well", as you put it, my general hunch about academic funding (and my personal experience), is that strong supervisor-relationships and good academic contacts will push you in the right direction. if you are good at what you do, some money will find you. as well as the central funding body in the UK, there are plenty of foundations and associations and even charities that will give you money. i imagine, for foreign students, that there is an additional layer of financial support and encouragement from your government/education department, too. i have been led to believe that talented researchers, so long as they are driven and have great ideas, and so long as they are prepared to 'up sticks' and move abroad, can find funding. although my own experiences of funding have admittedly been the '1 in a 1000' case, so i am undoubtedly both extremely fortunate and perhaps a little naive.

on the note of "doing seriously well", i would suggest your best chances of securing funding, and hence being able to do postgraduate research that isn't out of your own pocket/the bank of family, is to try and win some sort of departmental award or scholarship. i.e. any form of recognition or special write-up from your current department or academic staff. that sort of thing basically functions as a 'passport' to the next stage/next rung on the academic career ladder; prizes and funding awards tend to snowball. people who pay for a master's or PhD out of their own pocket generally find that pattern of self-funding to be a self-replicating one; people who win prizes or recognition tend to attract further encouragement. it's just like an extra layer of qualification, i guess.

oh and don't worry too much about having an exact research specification. proposals for PhD's can be quite vague. i've heard stories of a few talented 'rising stars' who essentially submitted a paragraph for their PhD application, in vague terms, and were still granted a place/funding. they want your talent and your drive more than they want a specific piece of work, 4 years in advance of its delivery.

i thought ANU is pretty good at science research. if you were black spark, you'd get a place in MIT American acedmia has quite a hard on for affirmative action and what not

Cybargs wrote:

i thought ANU is pretty good at science research. if you were black spark, you'd get a place in MIT American acedmia has quite a hard on for affirmative action and what not

not really sure where you get this shit from. american academia likes foreign students, generally. i think that's because american academia actually has a paradoxical low-opinion of most of its undergraduate education. the general consensus here is that american undergrad degrees, adopting a 'breadth over depth' model, tend to fall way behind other countries' degree systems, whose specialist approach really pays off when it comes to postgrad.

people see american postgrad as an easier option here, if for no other reason than the fact it's a numbers game. the top25 institutions in the UK generally all have acceptance rates of like 5-20%. there's a lot of people trying to get a slice of a very small comparative portion of knowledge capital (especially when you factor in the 'omg its a posh british uni' international appeal that sees the russian/asian/colonials send their kids here). the UK has maybe 30 institutions, at a stretch, that are within the world's top 1%. the US has more like 60-70. and most of the UK universities have tiny funding grants/endowments and student numbers, in comparison with their american (private) neighbors. it's pretty crazy when you consider that almost all 'top' universities here have acceptance rates that only the small and most selective ivy league/liberal arts colleges in the US have; an american student can go to a worldtop50 state college that has like a 60% admissions acceptance rate. that is unheard of here. we simply don't accommodate to that scale/number.

if i was interested in actually living in america for 6-7 years, i think it would be a lot easier to go to yale/cornell/colombia/stanford than it would be to pass the snooty admissions board for oxbridge. american academia is a land of funding plenty (relatively, anyway), and the admissions process is way more lax. the thing that puts most people off is that an american PhD takes literally 2x as long as a european one-- and not for reasons of high-standards or professional selectivity, either. it's simply because the american system relies in large part on a 'cheap labour' market, paying extremely well-qualified and highly-educated 20-somethings about $20,000 a year to mark the undergrad population's term-papers, and conduct their classes. it's a bit of a faustian pact: we'll fund your research proposal, but your ass is ours for your 20's. you will be paid less than someone flipping burgers-- paid less to do the highest level work at the world's most elite institutions. it's kind of perverse.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-05-10 08:39:12)

yeah, because the american system has to accommodate to such a wide range and disparity in quality of student, the first year of a PhD at an institution there is generally always a master's degree - including exams and 'you must pass this first' type stuff. basically wasting a year of your life, if you've already done a master's or graduated with an advanced honours elsewhere. you can typically get all of your actual research/reading done in the first few years as well - nobody really needs to spend a decade researching one thesis - but it's the fact the testing/lab-time and writing up will take you forever... because you have to fit it in around an ordinary 'teaching assistant' work-timetable. it takes twice as long because you basically work two full-time jobs, back to back. and you're broke the whole time. not to say that's necessarily a bad thing. but i'd prefer to have my PhD done in 3 years. hell, there's even time then (by mid-late 20's) to completely change and do something else.

i also tend to get really stressed and maxed-out whilst working on dissertation length pieces of work, haha. it's an all-consuming thing for me. i sat down and wrote-through my master's thesis in a 3 week blaze of glory, literally 8-10 hours a day. i can't cope with such a vast topic/big ideas floating around in my head for much longer. having a single 100,000-150,000 word piece of work weighing on you, half-done, incomplete, for a decade... would probably frazzle me.  my cortisol levels would be through the roof.

Last edited by Uzique The Lesser (2013-05-10 08:50:11)

Spark wrote:

Even so, it's still less than simple getting into the top American unis from what I've heard. My best mate, for example, tells me that at some the top institutions there's literally no point looking at the academic records of the most prospective applicants, as they all have near-perfect GPAs anyway.

well, yeah, the top unis here will ask to see your transcripts too, and will pick your brains on any lousy marks/dropped modules/less-than-perfect's you've had in the past, as well. standard fare with it being so competitive, and all. though it's not really that deterministic... they can appreciate that not everyone who is prepared to do 'top-rate' PhD work has always felt that way, or had a perfect academic life. that would require someone to be literally firing on all cylinders, with no bumps or life-interruptions, for 5-6 years of non-stop testing (from pre-uni to post-masters). they are realistic. if your proposal is good, and, again, if you've won the scholarships/prizes that show you are hot shit... they'll be very favourable.

for e.g. i wasn't even asked questions about my pretty average 2:1 mark in medieval literature from my first and second year (i could finally drop the medieval/old english/ancient languages baggage in my third-year, and fully specialize on the period that was really my interest). they didn't care.

Yeah, that makes sense. Was just wondering how it generally works, and that thing about ANU not having a proper mathematical physics group is basically the reason I'm probably going to leave.

Last edited by Spark (2013-05-10 09:03:10)