When I was a lad, and the Internet was all fields, the idea of going to university seemed far-fetched. I grew up in a small, working-class town in the north-east of England, where very few people went on to higher education. Until I was 17 and started applying for university places, the term BSc meant ‘bronze swimming certificate’. All I knew about university was that you could expect to take part in an annual boat race, and get a grilling from Bamber Gascoigne.
I guess that the situation is different in larger towns and cities. If your formative years are spent somewhere that has a university, you must get at least a sense of what these institutions are about from an early age. But there are still many young people from areas or families with no tradition of going to university. It’s hard to pursue opportunities if you’re not really aware that they exist.
So I liked this idea to give more 11-18 year-olds a taster of academic life.
Imperial College are driving a scheme to get 3500 young people onto 30 different courses over the summer break. The activities ‘range from building robots to using computers to make artworks and learning about how Google’s search engine works’. This includes careers advice and an introduction to research in Imperial’s Department of Computing.
Older pupils can see what it’s like to be a medical student, thanks to week-long courses at Imperial’s Faculty of Medicine, and shadowing doctors at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. And looking beyond undergraduate life, there’s even a hands-on entrepreneurial bioscience course.
It’s not a unique idea, and Imperial have run these courses in previous years, but it deserves some praise. I suspect many of the participants will be the bright young things who would have gone on to study science at university anyway, but I hope the scheme seeds a few minds that might never have considered this option.
Depending on your definition of North East (to me, York is borderline Southern) we may have been neighbours at some point! While I grew up mostly in York, with teachers for parents / 2 grandparents / 1 auntie / 1 uncle, I was born in Ashington and still have lots of relatives in the surrounding area.
My Dad was born and bred in Pegswood, near Morpeth – son of a coal miner and all that – and was the first person in his family to go to grammar school and then University. When he announced to his auntie that he was “going to University”, she said “well, they say it’s a nice place”. Turns out she thought University was the name of a really great town, where lots of people had spent the best years of their life.
So, yes, this kind of programme is a great idea. I hope they target it well though – I would definitely have signed up if it had been around when I was in high school, but like you said, I wasn’t the kind of kid that needed it!
Cath – I grew up in Grimsby, but did my undergrad and Master’s degree in York so know the city very well.
Quite a few of my school friends went on to uni, but I was the first from a (fairly extended) family to leave the town.
Yegods.
Grimsby. Cleethorpes is much nicer.
(But let’s not talk about Scunthorpe, mmK?)
So I liked this idea to give more 11-18 year-olds a taster of academic life.
Are they going to give them an impossible project that needs to be completed before an impossible deadline?
I was a mentor or a shadowpartner (which sounds faintly comic-book) or something like that when I was an undergrad – looking at the project website, it looks like the S5 ‘Student Life Experience’ activity.
I had a student shadow me for the day – including sitting in on lectures and me buying them lunch at the student union (with pocket money given to me by the scheme) and then a party at the union (again). I was lucky enough to know a little of what student life was like as my brother had been to university (twice, he switched) – though my main memory of visiting him in Pollock Halls in Edinburgh was of my dad sticking as many 5p pieces as he had in his pocket in the electric heater meter.
I think these kind of projects are useful at encouraging prospective students to not think of universities as being as daunting as they can appear. Even if that does mean that, when shadowing, I didn’t drag them into my dark undergraduate computer lab to spend the night desperately trying to get that code to work.
Grimsby is even further South than York!
I grew up in Haxby, about 3 miles north of the centre, not that you’d have had much cause to visit as a York Uni student. Nice campus, shame about the buildings… and the aggressive geese that chased me a few times when I was a kid. I’ve also played classical guitar in the big auditorium by the lake (can’t remember its name).
Yes, the geese were ferocious. The auditorium is simply called ‘Central Hall’, I think.