This university does not ‘teach’ you; rather, the lectures consist of someone monotonously reading off slides which haven’t been significantly updated in at least over a decade, expecting you to understand (often outdated) concepts, implementations, and calculations without many (if any) examples. This forces students to spend more time watching YouTube videos on the same topics — these are free, arguably better at teaching the content (e.g. linear algebra, much <3 to 3b1b), and don’t run you into £9,250 + interest of debt per year. Coursework is often marked incorrectly, with feedback being so far off the truth that it makes you wonder whether you should be the one lecturing the markers; I once failed a piece of coursework because they blamed me for being unable to get it to compile — they were trying to compile a project written for Java 17 with Java 7… sounds about right. After teaching the marker, you know, how to do their job, they finally managed to mark it correctly — I received full marks. To be honest, even their ‘correct’ marking is often dubious: the weights of some aspects of various coursework are worryingly unbalanced, and inflexibility in the mark schemes/testing tools they use cause (often significant) losses of marks needlessly.

While many modules are clearly outdated, at least one professor expressed interest in updating his first-year software engineering robotics module, CS1822: during my presentation, I introduced a modern alternative to the abandoned, decade-old Java 7 software library we had been required to use. Intrigued, he asked me to email him more information; we discussed various technical aspects of the alternative, and he decided to update the module over the summer for the 2021–2021 cohort. RHUL sometimes offers paid summer placements to students to aid faculty staff in updating the modules; recognising my natural ability and interest in the subject, he requested that the college pay me to help him do so — they refused on the basis that I was a first-year student, despite the whole thing being my idea, and regardless of how capable I was at completing the job.

RHUL’s interpretation of 'personal tutors' is also pretty questionable: I’m currently at the end of second year, having sat 3/7 of my exams, and I haven’t heard from my ‘tutor’ since the second term of first year — this may stem from their use of some postgraduate students as personal tutors, but who knows… no policies here ever follow any logical pattern.

This year, the Computer Science is pretty much the only department who decided to force their students to take in-person exams rather than online ones — despite sending out a survey to students at the beginning of the year where students overwhelmingly requested online exams (ignoring student feedback is prevalent through the uni). You might think that one would expect to sit in-person exams at uni — I did too — but after the course content has been delivered so poorly, it’s objectively unfair on students to expect them to be able to sit in-person exams this year, especially when you consider that this will be the first in-person exam many students have sat since their GCSEs.

With regards to preparation material and revision for the exams, RHUL continues its streak of providing less than what is necessary: while we are provided with past exam papers for all modules, they often contain content that is not examinable (but not marked as such, causing confusion). This is not because of the course content changing — as I mentioned, it does not — but rather, it is due to content (which students have paid for) not being taught due to UCU strikes, which you’ll find are pretty common here; RHUL loves underpaying their staff just as much as they love overcharging their students — they don’t even refund students for the content they were never taught! (This is, unequivocally, in breach of the Consumer Rights Act of 2015 § 50(2)(b), but don’t expect RHUL to give a damn… do I smell potential for a class-action lawsuit?) Anyway, in case being provided with partially-irrelevant past exam papers wasn’t bad enough, you’re in luck: RHUL employs a policy where they don’t provide any form of model answers or mark scheme for these papers. So to be clear: the teaching is helpless and frequently without examples, yet they expect you to somehow be able to answer exam papers without ever knowing whether your answer is even remotely the correct approach — let alone correct. I suppose, this is somewhat remedied when you realise that the content for some modules is so easy that it can be learned in entirety the 5 hours immediately preceding the exam without ever having attended a lecture (when the alternative is being bored to death, I’m sure you’d do the same… or not, maybe that’s just me). Thankfully, their saving grace is the single revision sessions they schedule for each modu— wait… did they schedule it DURING MY EXAM?! Surely not… (they did).

In case you didn’t already get the message, seemingly everyone here thinks (and knows) it’s a huge scam. Sure, all universities are to an extent, but while RHUL may lack in the academic league tables, they certainly come first in ones for scammers! But wait, it gets worse: this nickle-and-diming (e.g. £5 per laundry cycle? No thanks…) isn’t restricted to the college alone — if it’s this easy to take money from students (who should really be protected from this by legislation, but that’s for another discussion), surely the SU want’s a piece, right? The SU-run co-op on campus charges an invisible tax on every item, pocketing the money to spend on god knows what (I’m sure that brass band — lol — in the £75 summer ball isn’t going to be cheap…).

On the topic of the SU, they’re absolutely useless. Their greatest achievement in the 2021–2022 academic year was lobbying the college to re-open the library 24/7 — something that had been the norm pre-COVID-19; suffice to say that if the college has to be lobbied to re-implement something that was advertised to students but taken away as a ‘temporary’ measure (definitely for safety, not to cut costs, right?), something’s severely wrong. Compared to past achievements, this was so great that it got the SU’s VP for Education re-elected for 2022–2023 — this time as its President! Is the bar really that low? (Yes, it is.)

Ultimately, I wouldn’t be surprised if individuals in my friend group have spent more time ranting to each other about the uni than actually studying — I know I have. Now, while I’m in a unique position where I came to this uni entirely self-taught and already experienced in programming (I’ve been building software since the age of 14), I have learned nothing useful in my two years here. What I have learned, I have taught myself; I owe RHUL nothing, and yet for some reason I have to pay £9,250 per year for a piece of paper — nice.

I realise the above is largely negative, but the truth is: RHUL hasn't really got that much going for it — in reality, what I've described here is only the tip of the iceberg. If you're reading this, it's more than likely that you'll have seen the college's beautiful campus — RHUL's marketing machine does a pretty good job at shoving that down the throats of everyone it encounters. Other than that, the only real benefit this uni has are the people: most people I've encountered are friendly (aside from the odd thief or wannabe roadman), and during term time (well, when not in lockdown) there's plenty of opportunity to meet people through the SU's various events (however boring they are…) and various societies — although CompSoc hasn't really been so great for this since I joined, supposedly due to COVID-19 (it makes a great scapegoat, doesn't it?); the membership costs £7 per term, and supposedly you get a free t-shirt (which they still owe me from September 2020 — even the students love to scam you! /s). If you join in first year, you'll find that some people on the course attended a foundation year — on a personal note, I've been fortunate enough to become a part of a wonderful friendship group, mostly studying Computer Science, who have become my brothers; although they won't have realised it, they lifted me out of a deep depression I'd been in for many, many years, and so I view my student debt as a necessary cost of finding life-long friends who care about me deeply. I'm not sure whether I'd rather be in a mental depression or a financial one, but I guess RHUL isn't giving me much of a choice!

Going into third-year, we've just been asked to pick which final-year project we'd like to do. I've specifically requested to do something very slightly different, but completely analogous to one of the available projects: instead of writing a full-stack web application w/ frontend and backend, I asked whether I can write a frontend iOS application, powered by a backend web application — I hope to have a career in iOS development and already have an idea for an application targeted at university students, so this would provide excellent experience for the future; this is where we find out if RHUL truly cares about providing their students with opportunities to push themselves in the direction of their best interest, or whether they decline because it's too much hassle (and thus apparently not worth the £9,250 per year I pay them). Despite being one of the largest, fastest growing areas of computer science, mobile development is almost completely ignored here — I sincerely hope this changes soon.

To summarise, I'll leave you with a wonderful quote from a greek student who is currently "fed up" in his fourth year doing an integrated MSci: "Everybody in this uni wants to fuck you; the dick is coming."