Top of the pops
Yesterday the new QS World Rankings for universities came out. UCL, my current institution came out 4th in the world (again), whilst Surrey where I did my degree came a respectable but not really world beating 259th (interestingly in the Guardian UK rankings a few weeks ago it came 12th, above quite a lot of universities it's a long way below in these world ranking, which says a lot about the subjectivity of these tables!). I posted about this on Facebook yesterday* and it turned in to an interesting thread of comments, mostly by my old pals in Surrey being surprised that we'd all ended up in much higher up the rankings places and being rather negative about our abilities.
Given that we all hold our own in these 'world leading' universities (the conversation was mostly between myself and two guys at Imperial, ranked 6th in the world), I come to wonder why we're all so self deprecating about our degrees (other than that I'm self deprecating about pretty much everything I do!) when we actually got a generally fantastic quality of teaching, and, from my experience of marking them, harder exams than the undergrads get here at UCL. With the exception of Cambridge, where things are genuinely harder, it all actually just boils down to attitude.
Rather than making jokes about the admissions people having made mistakes and being puzzled that we've not been kicked out yet and actually accept that we're actually good enough to be (t)here, we'd do better ourselves.
Here's to confidence!
*my exact words were "A university that let me in is 4th best in the world? I doubt it somehow!", which sums stuff up quite well really.
Given that we all hold our own in these 'world leading' universities (the conversation was mostly between myself and two guys at Imperial, ranked 6th in the world), I come to wonder why we're all so self deprecating about our degrees (other than that I'm self deprecating about pretty much everything I do!) when we actually got a generally fantastic quality of teaching, and, from my experience of marking them, harder exams than the undergrads get here at UCL. With the exception of Cambridge, where things are genuinely harder, it all actually just boils down to attitude.
Rather than making jokes about the admissions people having made mistakes and being puzzled that we've not been kicked out yet and actually accept that we're actually good enough to be (t)here, we'd do better ourselves.
Here's to confidence!
*my exact words were "A university that let me in is 4th best in the world? I doubt it somehow!", which sums stuff up quite well really.