Yesterday I went to my favourite class called “Pollution and the Rehabilitation of Degraded Ecosystems”. We were learning about climate change so I was excited for it. As the lecture went on, I realized a couple things:
- I already learned everything we were learning in my first couple years of university in various courses back at McMaster.
-This class was a graduate class, how did these students not know about this stuff?
-Students didn’t know the answers to his simple questions.
From these observations, I concluded that North American schools must be better than European schools. I know that you might be thinking that it is impossible to come to that conclusion from simple observations. There are many facts, and proof from students themselves that made me come to that conclusion. First, I only have 8 hours of class a week here, whereas at McMaster I usually have a minimum of 22 hours a week of class. They say they focus on self-learning here, but they don’t give you enough work to do to equal the amount of hours I just go to class for at McMaster. I usually have a ton of reading to do at McMaster every week, so much that it is impossible to not fall behind – I think many students would agree with me there. At Strathclyde, they rarely have textbooks, and they just give you a reading list of articles to read. In one of my classes, we don’t have ANY weekly readings at all. It baffles me how I feel like I’m hardly in school. Second, I don’t have any quizzes, tests, or midterms this term. All I have to do are research papers, or essays, and then two final exams for my assessments. At McMaster, I usually have some sort of test every couple weeks it seems, or else I’ll have labs due almost every week. Students that are here doing their degree have even told me that school is a joke here. I’ve overheard lots of students in my classes who don’t do the weekly readings in the courses, even though that’s the bare minimum of work that has been assigned so far! I know that lots of people back at Mac don’t do those either, but there’s no other work to do here, so you might as well do SOMETHING. Most students only have to take 3 courses as a full course load. They say that it is harder to get higher marks here, and I wonder if the reason is because of the level of education. Guess I won’t know until I get some marks back.
I may be getting ahead of myself because I’ve only been here for a couple weeks. I’m sure that the schools here are fine, I’m just not used to these great differences. I feel like I’m on a giant vacation here, since I can pretty much travel every weekend, and not feel stressed about school. I do enjoy my classes when I have them though. They are all really small ranging from a class of 15 students, to maybe 40. They have a lot of class discussion so everyone is involved which is nice. My classes also have a lot of people from mixed backgrounds with all different accents. I was surprised when I wasn’t the only one with an “accent”. Made me feel more included to be honest. Its cool getting opinions of people from different countries, and learning about how things differ around the world. It’s definitely a different aspect of learning that I’m glad I’m experiencing. Now I know why everyone recommends going on exchange.
On Tuesday evening there was a fire in the James Weir Building. Apparently you could see flames and smoke from outside the building and classes are cancelled in the building today. That building has a lot of engineering labs, including labs with hazardous chemicals that made it hard for the fire fighters to put the fire out. We’ll have to see what the extent of the damage is once they release more information. I'm just glad it wasn't my residence!
