fishbel
Advent Thankvent 2012-13: Day 10: Universities
Next year it will be a decade since I started at university. A decade since I left home for the first time, entered an adulthood of sorts for the first time and ate houmous for the first time. I went from degree to degree and then, immediately that I left my last degree, I got a job at the University of Glasgow, pictured above. If it ain't broke, why move away from the cosseted loveliness of a university environment?
It's hard to underestimate the influence that attending university has had on my life. I expect that I would have learned to look after myself, made friends, been heartbroken, stayed up all night and come to eat Mediterranean dips had I not gone to a higher education institution. I'm the only person in my generation of my family to do an academic degree - I know that not everyone wants or needs it. But my route was, and is, uni.
I took today's photo while having lunch after doing one of my jobs at the university. I work in the widening access department, helping kids who go to schools with low take-up for higher education to prepare for university. I believe in this work. When people ask me if we aren't doing the pupils a disservice by propelling them into an environment for which they are not suited, there are now studies which show that the students we help do just as well, if not better, than their more affluent counterparts. I LOVE THOSE STUDIES.
I was working for the access to the professions side of the work, helping budding medics, dentists, vets and lawyers. We get them to fulfil various tasks and they come to a summer school to find out what uni will be like, what their envisaged profession will be like. I was working with a group of potential lawyers and we were reading various articles and discussing their written assignment topic: prisoner voting rights.
It was, well, it was hard. They rested neatly in the far, far right. Nope. Further than that. Not only was hanging too good for them, but in the thought experiment that 5% of them were incorrectly accused, they were happy to see those innocents die, rather than give human rights to the others. Or TVs, heaven forbid any of them have TVs. I tweeted my immediate reaction as: 'Don't know where the idea that teenagers crave change comes from. Most conservative demographic I ever encounter. Them & taxi drivers.' I remember discovering similar views in my peers at school, ten years ago. At that age I felt that it was to do with the affluence of my friends. But today we were in a catchment area marked as a deprivation area, and there were those ideas again. Maybe even more vehement. I normally leave these sessions pleased and bouncy. This time I was sad and angry. Sad sad and angry angry.
I have rested. I have chatted. I have pondered. Would my school friends still espouse these views? Most of them, not at all. Did I have some pretty terrible views at 16? Yup (man, I was shit to women). How did these things change? Uni. The University of Edinburgh, and the University of Life.
Churchill/Mark Twain/Dickens/Oscar Wilde/Dorothy Parker famously (is misreported as having) said: if you're not a liberal in your youth then you have no heart, if you're not a conservative in middle age then you have no brain. Currently, though, I get more and more left wing (not the same as liberal at all, as well you know, but why split hairs? Churchill had hardly any, though I grant Twain and Dickens more than make up for it) as I age. I am much, much more radical now than I was in my teens and early twenties. In my case, I put that down in large part to the skills I got, books I read and friends I made at university. The things which had made me square in school (loving poetry reciting, general knowledge and playing the clarsach) made me cool at uni. In the same sort of way, I learned to question, to probe, to weigh up facts as an end in itself in a way that would not have been okay at school, or which I was incapable of. I learned to transform a general feeling of ickiness to argument, reason and persuasion when people bad-mouthed immigrants or called our friends sluts. I became unwilling to let things lie when people said them, because I had learned that openness of mind is THE thing.
University taught me variously about the work of Michel Foucault, how to concentrate (RIP that skill), how to cook, how to love, how to bullshit about paintings, how to hope, how to put on plays and how to form ideas based on my understanding, my heart, and my reading rather than just stuff I've heard from my parents. I know there are other ways to engage with different viewpoints, but my-oh-my an arts degree is an easy peasy way to do it. Thank the heavens for universities.
Advent Thankvent 2012-13: Day 10: Universities
Next year it will be a decade since I started at university. A decade since I left home for the first time, entered an adulthood of sorts for the first time and ate houmous for the first time. I went from degree to degree and then, immediately that I left my last degree, I got a job at the University of Glasgow, pictured above. If it ain't broke, why move away from the cosseted loveliness of a university environment?
It's hard to underestimate the influence that attending university has had on my life. I expect that I would have learned to look after myself, made friends, been heartbroken, stayed up all night and come to eat Mediterranean dips had I not gone to a higher education institution. I'm the only person in my generation of my family to do an academic degree - I know that not everyone wants or needs it. But my route was, and is, uni.
I took today's photo while having lunch after doing one of my jobs at the university. I work in the widening access department, helping kids who go to schools with low take-up for higher education to prepare for university. I believe in this work. When people ask me if we aren't doing the pupils a disservice by propelling them into an environment for which they are not suited, there are now studies which show that the students we help do just as well, if not better, than their more affluent counterparts. I LOVE THOSE STUDIES.
I was working for the access to the professions side of the work, helping budding medics, dentists, vets and lawyers. We get them to fulfil various tasks and they come to a summer school to find out what uni will be like, what their envisaged profession will be like. I was working with a group of potential lawyers and we were reading various articles and discussing their written assignment topic: prisoner voting rights.
It was, well, it was hard. They rested neatly in the far, far right. Nope. Further than that. Not only was hanging too good for them, but in the thought experiment that 5% of them were incorrectly accused, they were happy to see those innocents die, rather than give human rights to the others. Or TVs, heaven forbid any of them have TVs. I tweeted my immediate reaction as: 'Don't know where the idea that teenagers crave change comes from. Most conservative demographic I ever encounter. Them & taxi drivers.' I remember discovering similar views in my peers at school, ten years ago. At that age I felt that it was to do with the affluence of my friends. But today we were in a catchment area marked as a deprivation area, and there were those ideas again. Maybe even more vehement. I normally leave these sessions pleased and bouncy. This time I was sad and angry. Sad sad and angry angry.
I have rested. I have chatted. I have pondered. Would my school friends still espouse these views? Most of them, not at all. Did I have some pretty terrible views at 16? Yup (man, I was shit to women). How did these things change? Uni. The University of Edinburgh, and the University of Life.
Churchill/Mark Twain/Dickens/Oscar Wilde/Dorothy Parker famously (is misreported as having) said: if you're not a liberal in your youth then you have no heart, if you're not a conservative in middle age then you have no brain. Currently, though, I get more and more left wing (not the same as liberal at all, as well you know, but why split hairs? Churchill had hardly any, though I grant Twain and Dickens more than make up for it) as I age. I am much, much more radical now than I was in my teens and early twenties. In my case, I put that down in large part to the skills I got, books I read and friends I made at university. The things which had made me square in school (loving poetry reciting, general knowledge and playing the clarsach) made me cool at uni. In the same sort of way, I learned to question, to probe, to weigh up facts as an end in itself in a way that would not have been okay at school, or which I was incapable of. I learned to transform a general feeling of ickiness to argument, reason and persuasion when people bad-mouthed immigrants or called our friends sluts. I became unwilling to let things lie when people said them, because I had learned that openness of mind is THE thing.
University taught me variously about the work of Michel Foucault, how to concentrate (RIP that skill), how to cook, how to love, how to bullshit about paintings, how to hope, how to put on plays and how to form ideas based on my understanding, my heart, and my reading rather than just stuff I've heard from my parents. I know there are other ways to engage with different viewpoints, but my-oh-my an arts degree is an easy peasy way to do it. Thank the heavens for universities.