Is Queen Mary University of London worth it?

i applied to queen mary to study psychology and got an offer but im not sure if i want to go. i went to visit it and was a bit put off by the area and have found out that it doesnt have the best reputation, but are these things a problem for anyone that goes or has studied there? i really want to love it but im not entirely convinced. is it worth it?

The question "is it worth it?" implies that there's some sort of trade-off between the positives and negatives, and you're trying to establish whether the positives outweigh the negatives. Right?

In terms of negatives you've identified that you were "a bit put off by the area" and that you've established that it "doesnt have the best reputation".

What are the positives, as you see them?

i applied to queen mary to study psychology and got an offer but im not sure if i want to go. i went to visit it and was a bit put off by the area and have found out that it doesnt have the best reputation, but are these things a problem for anyone that goes or has studied there? i really want to love it but im not entirely convinced. is it worth it?

Hi there, I'm a Queen Mary Psychology student so I'll try to give you my opinion on Queen Mary...

... by agreeing with you that we're not in a nice area of London at all. The local area is very off-putting but the campus itself is incredibly nice and a whole world unto its own, completely divorced from the local area, so you don't care about it once you're on campus.

Queen Mary doesn't have a bad reputation per se, it just gets accused of pretending to be better than it is for having joined the Russell Group only about a decade ago. This argument is complete nonsense in my opinion. In any case, basing your decision on where to go based on perceived reputation is an extremely poor way of deciding where you wish to study.

I'd rather let you make up your own mind about Queen Mary and where you want to go for university but speaking for myself, I'm very happy with it and the psychology course. Do make sure to go to the offer holder day, I'm sure that one way or the other it'll help you make up your mind

thankyou this is really helpful and has settled my mind a little bit. could you tell me more about your course and what every day life is like there?

Sure!

Teaching tends to be condensed across three days. Lecturers clearly know their stuff and are exceedingly friendly and approachable. We're used as psychological guinea pigs as part of our research methods module - sounds scary at first but it tends to be interesting stuff like eye-tracking experiments or quizzes about decision making or there was one about which accents are the sexiest The workload isn't bad either. It's a pretty relaxed affair at first and you're slowly eased into more work and are taught everything you need to know beforehand.

Every day life is, well, university life! On days we don't have lectures everyone more or less does whatever they want. I do uni work and reading in those days and since I live on campus, I might meet up with somebody else during the day or in the evening to revise together. The days we have teaching, people will show up for the first lecture of the day and after that we'll disperse before returning for the next lecture, if we have one. When it was warmer, I used to hang out by the canal with my friends but since it got cold we prefer the communal spaces indoors - the most popular one with us students is probably "the hub". We sometimes go to the library, to the top floors where you're allowed to talk and we might revise a little and get some work done although we admittedly don't do much of this. The majority of students are commuters so once we finish for the day, everyone leaves back home. If any club which I'm a member of is running that day, I'll go to it. Friday nights, there's nothing much happening on campus but I'll do something fun with my non-psychology friends.

could you also tell me more about the modules please?

Hi there, I'm a Queen Mary Psychology student so I'll try to give you my opinion on Queen Mary...

... by agreeing with you that we're not in a nice area of London at all. The local area is very off-putting but the campus itself is incredibly nice and a whole world unto its own, completely divorced from the local area, so you don't care about it once you're on campus.

Queen Mary doesn't have a bad reputation per se, it just gets accused of pretending to be better than it is for having joined the Russell Group only about a decade ago. This argument is complete nonsense in my opinion. In any case, basing your decision on where to go based on perceived reputation is an extremely poor way of deciding where you wish to study.

I'd rather let you make up your own mind about Queen Mary and where you want to go for university but speaking for myself, I'm very happy with it and the psychology course. Do make sure to go to the offer holder day, I'm sure that one way or the other it'll help you make up your mind

Sure. These are our modules for first year:

-Research methods. Pretty self explanatory. It's also the module for which we're sometimes used as psychological guinea pigs, as I mentioned above. Runs through the whole academic year.

-Statistics. Also pretty self explanatory. We have a statistics lab every other week. Runs through the whole academic year.

-Essential skills. In this module we are basically introduced and taught about, well, skills we should learn like essay writing, doing research, that kind of stuff, as well as being informed of stuff happening with the university and we'll soon be starting some career talks for this module. Runs through the whole academic year

-Exploring psychology: this module is basically what you think psychology is actually about. It's in this module in which we learn about the schools of psychology, Freud, Skinner, trauma, personality, development, relationships... all that juicy psychological stuff. This module basically introduces you to a lot of bits of psychology to prepare you for when you'll delve deeper into individual aspects of psychology in other modules, starting from the second semester. Runs through the whole academic year.

-Biopsychology: pretty much brain anatomy and biology. Only on the first semester

-Brain and behaviour: I actually don't know much about this module as we're yet to have our first lecture on it but I understand it is biopsychology part 2, but with perhaps more focus on the psychology bit. Only on the second semester.

-Emotion: Again, we haven't started this module yet but I think it deals with emotions Only on the second semester.

That's it for the first year. On the second year research methods and statistics gets combined into one module and the rest of the modules are proper psychology modules, dealing with the different aspects and branches of psychology. This trend continues onto the third year, in which you get to pick the modules you want, in addition to the dissertation: a research project/essay that you have to do in order to gain the BPS accreditation needed to practice as a psychologist. If you're happy to not get the BPS accreditation, then an essay module is available to you but virtually nobody chooses to do that because it means gratuitously limiting your future options.

I won't be studying psychology but I've visited before for an Open Day. Is this basically the same as the Offer Holders' day? I am asking because the open day (last spring or summer) wasn't of much use to me as I couldn't ask any questions or talk to any students. Is the offer holders' day more useful? UCL's open day for example was better and you could ask questions about industrial year, modules, programming languages etc.

that seems really interestinggg, what is your favourite module so far? i also wanted to ask how are you assessed? is there a final exam at the end or are there regular exams and what else determines your grade?

They're both very similar, but the offer holder day tends to have a little more detail. I don't think that I talked with any current students in the offer holder day but I honestly don't remember if they were there or not - I wasn't looking for them because I had chatted with Queen Mary students beforehand.


My favourite module? Tied between exploring psychology and biopsychology!

The way we're assesed depends on the module but typically we have an end of module exam worth about 75% of the mark and the remainder of the grade is either a second, smaller exam or coursework (lab reports and essays). The only exception to this is essential skills, which is all coursework, at least to my knowledge. Exams are MCQs in the first year, and they switch to a mixture of MCQs and essays from the second year onwards.

wow just multiple choice questions? it sounds too good to be true! is the quality of teaching good? is there often days where they don't even turn up? earlier you said that teaching is condensed across three days, how many hours a day is there teaching across these three days? and how much difficult is it compared with A Levels? thankyou for answering all of my questions by the way, its really helpful

You're welcome, glad to help.

"Wow just multiple choice questions?! That'll be walk in the park" was the reaction that many, including myself, had, because not only are they MCQs but also online and open book. But then we had our first exam. The questions are difficult. Some of them will require you to quickly search for the results of some experiments. A lot of questions are about applying logic to what you've learnt and some questions are specifically designed so that you can only answer them if you went to the lectures. There's also an element of time pressure so if you don't know the answers, you can still find the answer in the book but you won't be able to finish the exam. Still, it's MCQs so if you've done your work, it's still easy. But don't let yourself be lulled by a false sense of security just because they are MCQs. In any case, as I said this is only for year 1, which is only worth 10% of your degree.

On semester 1 we had on average about 3 teaching hours of work a day. Some days it can be as little as 1 hour (every couple of weeks we have a day with just a tutorial), some days we had 4 hours. I'm looking at my calendar for semester 2 and I can see that we now have more or less consistently 4 hours a day.

Quality of teaching is good, in my (biased) opinion. All the lecturers clearly know their stuff and I'm very happy with the way they teach. I think most people would agree with me on this but I know some that wouldn't. You'll only fully find out once you start university but you can get an idea with the taster lecture in the offer holder day. They're also very happy to help you if you didn't understand everything - in fact, this is one of the things that drew me to Queen Mary. It is extremely easy to get hold of the teaching staff and ask them questions and to get help. Obviously you can always approach staff in any other university and they'll help you, but talking with people studying elsewhere, I think Queen Mary is almost unparalleled in how quick and forthcoming the help is.

Lecturers have always shown up. I know that Queen Mary has had lots of lecturers striking in the last year and whatnot but the science degrees seem to have been largely unaffected, if at all.

Difficulty compared to A level... I'd say about the same? If I think at what we do, obviously the difficulty is harder compared to A level but most of the time, it doesn't feel like that. If you manage your time right, you have a lot more time to study and work. If you don't manage your time right, you'll find yourself at the end of term in a mad rush trying to do everything and you'll naturally feel that university is much harder than A level.

But listen, I'm talking a lot about my experience and university life at Queen Mary, because it'e what I know, but a lot of it will hold true for other/most universities too. Particularly when considering I'm talking about a psychology degree, which is a BPS accredited degree and so it'll be very similar to the other BPS accredited degrees!

wow this all sounds so great, what do you think the best thing is about studying there? and how have you found the course so far? and can you tell me about the dissertation in the third year?

Can anyone guide me on this !
I got an offer for law at Queen mary yesterday and they have mentioned requirements of french barcularate something but i am doing alevels and have sent predicted alevels!
What are the requirements ?
And they have also mentioned requiring ielts but with a background of olevels and alevels how they can ask me for that?

Register in their portal. They must have already sent you a link. Supposedly you can send messages on it. You can also try calling their admissions which could be faster. There must surely have been a mistake.

The best thing? The tutorials. They're meant to be in groups of 10, but a good 50% or more of students don't show up for... reasons? It's very silly in my opinion, particularly considering that the tutorials are ran by the lecturer that will be writing you a reference when you leave university so it's kind of important to give them a good impression, which is hard to do when you don't show up. But I digress. They might sound intimidating at first but they're very laid back affairs where we do some tasks to get us started on assignments or we had a tutorial in which we were given topics and had to come up with our own experiments, things like that. And the small group teaching (allegedly meant to be a group of 10, often much less than that) really helps to make it, dare I say it, cosy. You get more time to interact with your tutor and they don't bite! No questions is too silly for a tutorial

I've been liking the course so far! As I said earlier, I like the teaching, very happy with how approachable the staff are. I don't have any major complaints, other than the fact that every other Friday in the first semester I had what I consider to be a totally sadistic 4 hours of statistics in a row. Nothing against the quality of teaching of the module (in fact, for the first time in my life I actually understand what I'm doing when it comes to stats), I just dislike statistics with a passion that is hard to put into words We had a lecture and then a statistics lab. I could have fixed it - there was another statistic lab running after lunch and we were allowed to find somebody that went to that lab and swap places if we wanted to. I didn't do it because all of my friends ended up in the morning statistics lab so I'd rather suffer in good company than suffer alone in the afternoon statistics lab. Very happy though to see that they switched this around on the second semester and now the statistics lab is on a different day altogether.

I know very little about the dissertation in the 3rd year. I know we can choose the research topic we want to write about but the university will also circulate a list of topics we can use. And we will also have a supervisor. But that's all I know.

hellooo, i just got back from the offer holder day and i really loved it. the professor was lovely, the shop and cafe was nice, and the buildings are beautiful. i think this may be my first choice now