middlesex, thames valley or kingston for psychology?

Like many people have said, these uni's aren't exactly worth going to :/, not trying to be rude but graduate job prospects from these universities are very terrible even with a lot of work experience. And even if you get a job, these degrees aren't worth much on the salary scale, its like not even going to university. I suggest you either do sandwich course or change university through adjustment ( getting better then predicted grades ).

But out of them thames valley is the worst.

Thames Valley has the reputation as being the worst university in the whole of England, it looks like more of a college and the campuses aren't university like.

Middlesex has a bunch of people who speak like badmans and it is rare to find white people and non whites mixing

the same goes for kingston, and also in kingston people tend not to do their own work.

Now I'm guessing you're aiming for lower grades? I suggest looking at better universities that are a step up. Have a look at Nottingham Trent, Oxford Brookes and other polytechnics because they are actually decent, and in better areas. You couldn't have picked unis any worse; I deem these to be the worst of the worst

I really wasn't going to make a post as I clicked on this thread by mistake looking for an old thread but I'm sorry some of these comments just have to be countered.



Right...

First things first any qualification in anything at all is preferable to nothing and work experience will trump everything (real work experience doing the job, not 4 weeks filing two days a week), if you have experience your qualifiactions mean nothing they'll just want to know you actually have them as a formaility like a bank account and a home address.

The vast majority of HR drones never went to university they don't have a university "blacklist" and firms that actually give a crap where you went to university tend to recruit directly from those universities.

Where you went to university doesn't matter as much as what you study and what grade you got, one of our TA's got a first and he's doing a postgrad in something at UCL another TA is at Goldsmiths. One of our lecturers also lectures at Brunel.

I tell you this to demonstrate something, our lecturer at TVU is the same guy at Brunel our TA is the same student at UCL that he was at TVU. For you personally where you study and what you study is incredibly important and will mean a great deal to you but to everyone else, meh...



How can it have the reputation of being the worst university in the whole of England? Where would you even begin attempting to logically defend a statement like that?

I'll grant you the fact that the buildings look crap, everyone knows it and we all joke about it frequently but I don't understand how that has any bearing on anything. You don't take classes outside of the building and on the inside it's fairly typical.

Kings College has some really **** buildings as well as Imperial (I'm thinking of that building by Waterloo but it could belong to someone else) what does that say about them as a place of learning?

You have to remember these buildings are in London, real estate here is ****ing insane. Places like UCL and University of the Arts do have fantastic buildings but they're easily sitting hundreds of millions of pounds worth of property and if TVU was sitting on a resource like that it would most likely be in exactly the same locations as it is now because there would be no way to justify keeping 500,000 square feet of prime central London real estate worth millions while your research facilities are non existant.


TVU's slough campus is going to be sold off for £15 million to put that into perspective my uncle has a 2 bedroom apartment 2 minutes walking distance from the Tate Britain, the Chelsea College of Art and Design is across the road from the Tate. My uncles 2 bedroom apartment is about to be sold (subject to contract) for £1.6 million, so could you even imagine how much Chelsea college is worth?

Stunning buildings with wide open spaces in Nottingham doesn't mean as much as having them in London and if your university can afford to occupy and maintain that space chances are they've got money to burn, which means they've got decent research facilities which has attracted a good few top academics which has enabled them to jump up the league tables and raise their entry requirements and get them even higher in the tables.

Speaking of tables something has bugged me reading both of your posts.

See I remember waiting to be interviewed last year at TVU and as they were calling out the courses I remember them asking if everyone who is doing Pyschology can raise their hand and seeing literally this entire auditorium raise their hand which got me thinking how can a course with so much interest be so bad?

Now you both make the claim that TVU is "the worst" and I'm assuming a large part of this view is based on league tables after all you've been talking about graduate prospects and reputation and what other source would you use to gauge this?

I'm always arguing about how the tables are bull**** but in this instance I'm going to use them to show your assertions don't appear to be based on anything at all.

In order to prove I'm trying to be objective I'm going to go by the table which frequently ranks TVU the lowest and that would be The Times.

So first claim - "TVU is the worst out of those choices Universities"

While in overall terms (according to The Times) that is true it shouldn't be ignored that the reason I picked The Times is because it ranked TVU so low.

However if we view by subject the statement is not true, for Psychology The Times ranks TVU way above Middlesex and way way above Kingston but it's still 75th out of 102 overall so nothing to write home about.

But considering this is for Pyschology the assertion that TVU is the worst is wrong.

Second Claim - "Terrible Graduate prospects"

Not according to the Times.

See this is my problem with league tables in general, TVU ranks 75th for Pyschology and this is because they reward bull**** trivia rather than results.

TVU is ranked 74th for student satisfaction and 89th for entry requirements which drops it's overall rating by a huge margin and do you know where it is for graduate prospects? 34th.

So according to The Times you'll be a little bit worse off than if you studied at Nottingham Trent but way way better of than if you studied at Oxford Brookes but funnily enough guess what university is above Nottingham Trent? Middlesex.

Anyway I'm bored.

To the OP do what you believe is best for you, it's all fine and well people claiming you should re-sit but it's really not that simple.

Suppose you do re-sit and you get higher results and you get accepted into a university which is however many places higher (most likely a Russell group uni) you'll be paying a hell of a lot more and you've got to ask is it really going to be worth it in the long run? That's up to you but there's another side to this, suppose you do re-sit and you don't get higher grades now you're in exactly the same position you're in now only you'll be paying twice as much.

You get out of university what you put in, if you're planning on just punching in and out between drinking sessions and naps it doesn't matter where you go and if you really love the subject and want to succeed in it you'll probably end up studying so hard you'll be so far ahead you get nothing out of classes.

University is weird and a lot of people really don't understand that you go to university to learn about your subject not be taught your subject so be very skeptical when people complain about the quality of teaching because thats usually the calling card of people who didn't engage with their subject at all.

People who make no effort to learn don't want to take responsibility for that fact so they put it on the teaching when they really weren't there to be taught.

I really wasn't going to make a post as I clicked on this thread by mistake looking for an old thread but I'm sorry some of these comments just have to be countered.



Right...

First things first any qualification in anything at all is preferable to nothing and work experience will trump everything (real work experience doing the job, not 4 weeks filing two days a week), if you have experience your qualifiactions mean nothing they'll just want to know you actually have them as a formaility like a bank account and a home address.

The vast majority of HR drones never went to university they don't have a university "blacklist" and firms that actually give a crap where you went to university tend to recruit directly from those universities.

Where you went to university doesn't matter as much as what you study and what grade you got, one of our TA's got a first and he's doing a postgrad in something at UCL another TA is at Goldsmiths. One of our lecturers also lectures at Brunel.

I tell you this to demonstrate something, our lecturer at TVU is the same guy at Brunel our TA is the same student at UCL that he was at TVU. For you personally where you study and what you study is incredibly important and will mean a great deal to you but to everyone else, meh...



How can it have the reputation of being the worst university in the whole of England? Where would you even begin attempting to logically defend a statement like that?

I'll grant you the fact that the buildings look crap, everyone knows it and we all joke about it frequently but I don't understand how that has any bearing on anything. You don't take classes outside of the building and on the inside it's fairly typical.

Kings College has some really **** buildings as well as Imperial (I'm thinking of that building by Waterloo but it could belong to someone else) what does that say about them as a place of learning?

You have to remember these buildings are in London, real estate here is ****ing insane. Places like UCL and University of the Arts do have fantastic buildings but they're easily sitting hundreds of millions of pounds worth of property and if TVU was sitting on a resource like that it would most likely be in exactly the same locations as it is now because there would be no way to justify keeping 500,000 square feet of prime central London real estate worth millions while your research facilities are non existant.


TVU's slough campus is going to be sold off for £15 million to put that into perspective my uncle has a 2 bedroom apartment 2 minutes walking distance from the Tate Britain, the Chelsea College of Art and Design is across the road from the Tate. My uncles 2 bedroom apartment is about to be sold (subject to contract) for £1.6 million, so could you even imagine how much Chelsea college is worth?

Stunning buildings with wide open spaces in Nottingham doesn't mean as much as having them in London and if your university can afford to occupy and maintain that space chances are they've got money to burn, which means they've got decent research facilities which has attracted a good few top academics which has enabled them to jump up the league tables and raise their entry requirements and get them even higher in the tables.

Speaking of tables something has bugged me reading both of your posts.

See I remember waiting to be interviewed last year at TVU and as they were calling out the courses I remember them asking if everyone who is doing Pyschology can raise their hand and seeing literally this entire auditorium raise their hand which got me thinking how can a course with so much interest be so bad?

Now you both make the claim that TVU is "the worst" and I'm assuming a large part of this view is based on league tables after all you've been talking about graduate prospects and reputation and what other source would you use to gauge this?

I'm always arguing about how the tables are bull**** but in this instance I'm going to use them to show your assertions don't appear to be based on anything at all.

In order to prove I'm trying to be objective I'm going to go by the table which frequently ranks TVU the lowest and that would be The Times.

So first claim - "TVU is the worst out of those choices Universities"

While in overall terms (according to The Times) that is true it shouldn't be ignored that the reason I picked The Times is because it ranked TVU so low.

However if we view by subject the statement is not true, for Psychology The Times ranks TVU way above Middlesex and way way above Kingston but it's still 75th out of 102 overall so nothing to write home about.

But considering this is for Pyschology the assertion that TVU is the worst is wrong.

Second Claim - "Terrible Graduate prospects"

Not according to the Times.

See this is my problem with league tables in general, TVU ranks 75th for Pyschology and this is because they reward bull**** trivia rather than results.

TVU is ranked 74th for student satisfaction and 89th for entry requirements which drops it's overall rating by a huge margin and do you know where it is for graduate prospects? 34th.

So according to The Times you'll be a little bit worse off than if you studied at Nottingham Trent but way way better of than if you studied at Oxford Brookes but funnily enough guess what university is above Nottingham Trent? Middlesex.

Anyway I'm bored.

To the OP do what you believe is best for you, it's all fine and well people claiming you should re-sit but it's really not that simple.

Suppose you do re-sit and you get higher results and you get accepted into a university which is however many places higher (most likely a Russell group uni) you'll be paying a hell of a lot more and you've got to ask is it really going to be worth it in the long run? That's up to you but there's another side to this, suppose you do re-sit and you don't get higher grades now you're in exactly the same position you're in now only you'll be paying twice as much.

You get out of university what you put in, if you're planning on just punching in and out between drinking sessions and naps it doesn't matter where you go and if you really love the subject and want to succeed in it you'll probably end up studying so hard you'll be so far ahead you get nothing out of classes.

University is weird and a lot of people really don't understand that you go to university to learn about your subject not be taught your subject so be very skeptical when people complain about the quality of teaching because thats usually the calling card of people who didn't engage with their subject at all.

People who make no effort to learn don't want to take responsibility for that fact so they put it on the teaching when they really weren't there to be taught.

Actually they kinda do have a blacklist, you haven't spoken to people who work in the city, I have, i got some friends with connections and so far as I know they look at whether you went to a top 10 university in finance, they then check whether you have a 2:1 or first and then look at your work experience.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this a thread asking about psychology courses in a forum dedicated to psychology?

But even still I'm going to have to call bull**** on you as I know someone who graduated from Nottingham (a decent uni but it's never been top 10) with a 2:2 in Politics who is currently working at "The Goldman Sachs" after doing work experience there.

I'm not going to say that's typical but if what you're saying was at all true he wouldn't be there, yet he is. Don't believe everything you're told people lie to embellish their achievements and justify their failures and finance tends to attract people with egos that while huge are also incredibly fragile.

Most people working in that world give up so much of their life chasing paper that their bank balance is the only place they can derive any sense of self worth, none of this however has any relevance to the OP's question and your reply to me didn't negate anything I said.

To be honest, I have no idea why you are defending these universities. They are awful departments whatever way you look at them. Additionally, when considering how competitive the graduate marketplace is for Psych grads, going to one of of these unis is a great way to spend £20,000 to put yourself straight to the bottom of the pile.

To be honest, I have no idea why you are defending these universities.

As for the market, can you name me a graduate market that isn't competitve? Actually can you name me any market in anything that isn't competitive? We live in a capitalist society, capitalism can't function with 100% employment so there is always someone willing to do your job for less.

As for finding yourself on the bottom of some imaginary pile I say again firms do not have university blacklists, people who care what university you went to recruit from those universities but even then that doesn't mean you'll never have the opportunity of working for those companies! You'll just have to get there by alternate means.

Research and teaching are completely seperate issues you're acting like one directly effects the other, it doesn't.

A good researcher is not necessarily going to be a good teacher and vice versa, as an undergrad research is not within your purview the only thing you should be concerned about is the quality of teaching and graduate prospects.

Any access to that equipment as an undergrad will be severly restricted but again we're talking about PhD's and research which has nothing to do with quality of teaching.

Employers don't know jack about ****, most of the people you'll find yourself sitting in front of believe all your academic qualifications are a sham because when they were in school it was apparently so much harder.

She's just fairly typical, wants to go to university doesn't know what she wants to do with her life and for whatever reason thinks psychology will be interesting. I'm sure her employment concerns will based on money and free time rather than the contributions she can make to the field.

See you're going to have to clarify what you're talking about because if I was talking about employment I would say job not place, place implies you're refering to something else and 200 applicants for 1 position sounds like an exaggeration unless you're talking about something incredibly specific which I believe you are.

I'm talking about the general job market because like it or not psychology is very generic, if you went onto any random university campus with 6 eggs and threw them at 6 students 3 of them are most probably reading psychology.