A First-year’s Thoughts on The University of Edinburgh

Informatics Forum @ The University of Edinburgh

The first semester is over, exams are done with, and I finally feel like I am capable of and entitled to sharing some of my experiences with studying at the University of Edinburgh. Because I could have used some assurence like this when I was preparing to study here, I aim to give exactly that to anyone looking for something similar. Hence, I hope that it will be of help to anyone considering Edinburgh or similar British universities as one of their choices.

I especially aim to focus on the organization of my courses, on the workload associated with them, the difficulty of the material studied and how prerequisites like IB (International Baccalaureate) or A-Levels may help with it, as well as the time required to move smoothly through the courses. Let’s get on with it then.

Organization of courses — outside of lectures

One of the main topics I really wanted to write about in my first blog but left it to this one was organization. In short, it is absolutely perfect — or at least close to it.

The school offers a vast range of services to its students, both on-demand (i.e. you have to come to the office or send them an email) and directly accessible by the students.

As for the on-demand services, one can essentially do anything they like to a reasonable degree, be it change their courses or even degree, choose different tutorial and workshop allocations (because there are plenty to choose from) or solve a technical/financial problem at hand. The great thing is that some of these actions can be done by the student themselves, so, for instance, I can change some of my tutorial allocations right now at the click of a button, if I am not happy with my tutor.

We also have a great tool for timetabling, which allows us to look through all the courses available to us, pick the ones we like and see how they would fit into our timetable, or simply go through the tons of information about them and get a really good sense of what they might be like.

Connected to that is the fact that all the Informatics courses and many non-Informatics, as well, have their dedicated course websites (which are available publicly, so even prospective students can browse through them), where the students can find the course plan, exercises, recommended literature, and more, depending on the specific course.

This brings me to the fact that the courses I have taken so far and the ones I am taking at the moment are meticulously well planned, some even to the lengths of having a study plan with exercises to do to which cover the course syllabus (especially Mathematics).

Organization of courses — “inside” of lectures

When it comes to the lectures themselves, the teachers use pre-prepared slides with often most of the material required for the exams — in the Informatics and Business courses, at least — and these slides are readily available online, so if you happen to miss a lecture or two, you can catch up at home easily.

Most of my courses also use a platform called Piazza, which is a forum where students can ask questions and teachers or other students can answer or give hints towards the solution. The response rate of this system is often from a couple of minutes to a day, and you can also ask anonymously, so if you have a burning question you don’t want to bother the teacher with during the lecture, you can just ask and receive at the comfort of your home.

Many courses also offer PALs (Peer-Assisted Learning) groups, where a handful of second- or later- year students help the first-years with some of the key concepts one-on-one or in a small group, which I found extremely helpful for one of my courses last semester.

There is also obviously the problem of having too many people in the lectures to ask them any questions, which some courses solve by using the TopHat system, which allows the teacher to pose a question and collect real-time answers from their 200-or-more students online, during the lecture. In Mathematics, for instance, this is very deeply incorporated and the teacher usually asks around 5 questions per lecture, and this gives the students time to think about tricky topics, discuss with their classmates and come to a common decision, the correctness of which is later fully explained by the teacher.

Workload, difficulty and time

Coming to uni, everyone told me that I would have incredible amounts of work compared to high school, and that I would hardly find any time for procrastination (minor exaggeration). Well, I find the opposite to be true. For each of my courses, the workload usually spans from 30 minutes to 4 hours a week, which, considering I have 4 courses in both semesters, is not terrible at all.

It is, however, very important to say that one has to manage their time efficiently. I have never really done assignments in advance and never really had a problem with the results either, but now I found that the best possible way to handle this regular workflow is to do most during the weekend and then have the rest of the week for anything else I want to do. This then gives me the ability to work ahead of schedule, sometimes do work for two weeks instead of one and focus on studying the things I am interested in, such as learning a new programming language (or whatever floats your boat).

The problem with this is that you really have the choice to do whatever you want. It may seem like an advantage at first, but many people will struggle with having flexible deadlines and not enough work to do, and they will just use the free time to procrastinate. I fell into the same boat at the beginning of the year and it was hard to get out of it, but it really pays off.

Importance of IB and similar

I may have made it look easy in the last section, and as if any sort of prerequisites are useless, but the opposite is true — I find that IB helped me a lot, and even that I should have focused on some of its aspects a bit more to have a smoother ride.

First of all, the general concept of IB gives you the tools to be able to manage your time (to an extent), to efficiently and effectively prepare for hard exams, to write good essays (and “bs” your way around topics you know nothing about, if that is the last-minute case), and many more key soft skills.

But not only that; it gave me a huge advantage course-wise, since many IB courses (and A-Levels alike) cover the same topics as the university ones, only to a slightly smaller extent. For instance, doing Mathematics HL gave me a good background in vectors, which were vital in my first-semester Linear Algebra, and even a better background in Calculus, which is now my second-semester course. Apart from Mathematics, I have heard from others that this applies to Physics, Psychology, Economics, and many more, too. If I had (oh, this annoying phrase) studied for Calculus more in my last year, the course would had been even easier now.