Scottish universities, human errors, and an elite university in East London.
😊 Welcome
We all know that Scottish universities are a bit different from the rest of the UK, but what actually makes them different? And within this small, but wonderful country, what makes the universities distinct from each other?
Based on my 12 years of experience studying and working in Scottish universities, I give you a super-quick lowdown.
We look at human error in admissions, and what to do if it affects you.
And we finish with a real gem of a university in East London. If I tell you it only became a full-fledged university in 2013, can you guess who I’m talking about?
✍️A super-quick guide to the Scottish Universities
I grew up in Scotland, studied at Edinburgh and then worked at Stirling for the first phase of my career. I absolutely loved my time at university, and it’s safe to say that I am a big fan of Scottish education. But is it really all that special? Is there really anything that sets Scottish universities apart from others in the UK?
Well, there are certainly some differences, but whether they are special, depends on you and what you are looking for.
Building on the approach that I took a couple of weeks ago, looking at similarities between universities based on a bit of history, I thought it would be interesting to look at the Scottish universities in three quite distinct groups:
The four ‘ancient’ universities
Scotland’s oldest universities, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh all date back to the 15th and 16th centuries. St. Andrews, established first in 1413, and Edinburgh last in 1583. But be under no illusion, the universities of today bear little resemblance to their mediaeval incarnations, with more than ten thousand students studying at the smallest of these (St. Andrews), and just shy of 50,000 at the largest (Edinburgh).
They do all continue to teach the traditional university subjects, such as sciences, arts and humanities, medicine, law and divinity, but they also teach and research the most modern of disciplines; frequently ahead of their time. Edinburgh, for example has been a leading light in AI for over 50 years now.
📸 University snapshot: Queen Mary University of London
Became a university in: It’s complicated! (See below)
Student population: 26,690 (2022/23)
Location: The main campus site, with academic, social and accommodation is on the Mile End Road in east London.
Subject areas: Everything you’d expect at a large multi-faculty university, including Humanities & Social Sciences, Medicine & Dentistry, Science and Engineering, and Life Sciences.
Admissions: Undergraduate entry grades are high, with courses asking between BBB and A*AA. Interviews are required for Medicine and Dentistry, but are not usually required for other subjects.
A large, highly prestigious, research-intensive university located in the working class east end of London? Surely that can’t be right? Well, it just might be!
I worked as an interim Head of Student Recruitment at Queen Mary, stayed on as a marketing consultant, and then returned later to bring them on board as the first university in the world to launch Unibuddy, the peer-to-peer chat platform.
What I experienced was a super-high quality, traditional university, which (rather like Leicester) has research and teaching that compares with the very best, but which has none of the elitism that is often associated with such universities.
Queen Mary really only became the large, multi-faculty university it is today through the merger of Queen Mary & Westfield College with Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry in 1995, and legally it has only been called a university since 2013. But make no mistake, this is not a ‘new’ university.
The medical college at London Hospital which now forms part of the medical school is the oldest in the country…
💡 Did You Know?
Universities are run by humans. And they sometimes make mistakes.
Last week we saw one university send out offer emails to students who hadn't even applied for a place.
It happens, because we are all human after all.
If a university seems to have made a mistake with something connected to your application, or that of a student you are helping, simply get in touch with the university.
Chances are it's just a simple human error, and they will correct it.
Thanks for reading!
Jonathan
