Neuroscience at UCL?

Hello!

I have an offer to study Neuroscience at UCL. According to the rankings it's one of the best universities in the UK, with one of the best Neuroscience programs. However, I've heard the teachers are not approachable and that they are good at research but not too good at actually teaching others? I'd like to hear some opinions from those who study Neuroscience at UCL. I'm really confused. My other option would be the University of Manchester.

Hi there, late reply but I guess this is for any prospective students that stumble across this thread.

I'm currently nearing the end of year 2 neuroscience at UCL so I can offer some insight into how the first two years go. My first year was after covid so UCL used that as an excuse to have nearly everything online, had about 3 real life Q&A sessions per week which was more than a lot of courses surprisingly. This year things are relatively back to normal with 2-3 lectures per day. One thing that has stayed though is there is still a lot of online exams but this is slowly changing back to in person exams so I imagine they'll end up settling for about 50/50 across the course in the future. The modules were decent in year 1 (except Chem oh my) and I enjoyed the few neuroscience modules we had although they are marked rather harshly and getting feedback and marks takes an obscene amount of time. For term 1 year 2 you don't do any neuroscience which was strange but come term 2 you will all of a sudden have a mountain of neuroscience and there is usually a lot of overlap in the topics depending on which modules you take.
There is also quite the variation in the quality of lecturers, some are pretty bad public speakers but some are great - a lot of them are very approachable and given stuff will be increasingly in person it'll be easier to develop a working relation with a lot of professors. One note is that the course is really to set you up for lab work in the future so it can feel perhaps too research focused and maybe not so applicable to other jobs.

A little thing to note as well that if you choose to take biomed at UCL and plan to transfer to neuroscience in year 2 it is very difficult, this year only 2 people were accepted to switch - otherwise you can take the biomed neuroscience stream which is pretty much the same as neuroscience but at the end you get biomed on your degree instead of neuroscience despite doing the same stuff.

All in all, at this point, I would definitely recommend it. As you go through the course you build up the knowledge and stuff starts coming together satisfyingly. You also see how expansive the neuroscience research at UCL is, it really is at the frontier of this kind of research in Europe and there's so many experts in so many fields here. Also very cool to live in the cultural hub of the UK (although it's super expensive) and make the most of it by joining societies and starting a sport or something.

Hope this helped!

Hi, I am still waiting for the decision. What is the selection criteria for Neuroscience? Will there be any interview? My A Level predicted grades are A*A*A . This is my fifth choice and other 4 were medicine applications. I couldn't get any medicine offers. Please let me know the process in UCL for neuroscience. Thanks

A*A*A is defo good enough for the entry requirements, it was just AAA when I last checked. There is no interview so I believe they mostly go off how good your personal statement is. I only applied for neuroscience courses so mine was very neuroscience orientated and demonstrated I had a passion for it which I think they find important. But, I imagine they get a lot of med students too so I'm not sure they're too picky. Acceptance rate is relatively high I think so hopefully you'll be fine, best of luck!