Global Sustainability (Including Year Abroad)

University of Essex

The advantage of Essex is that it is a campus university so all the social and educational spaces are concentrated in one place. The campus itself is beautiful, with over 200 acres of parkland, and it's less than an hour away from London! An improvement would be to have a greater variety of affordable and healthy food options on campus.

The community is really great, and everything being on campus makes it a lot easier to get involved. The library is also open 24hrs which supports different productivity times.

The University of Essex is a great place to study as it is a campus uni, surrounded by acres of parkland, meaning that everything is really close together and it is really easy to stay on for sports and societies which take place in the evening. We have our own theatre and cinema on campus, and tickets are always discounted for students. I am never bored, and I make sure that I keep on top of the work by studying in the library which has so many varied study areas and resources. Although I don't go out often, we have two bars and a night club all on campus, so if you want to party, there isn't a long trek home afterwards! The Student's Union is also really good at listening to students' opinions and creating real change based on their feedback; they put on really good events during Fresher's Week and beyond such as SU Makes (weekly craft events), mixers for different groups of students, Holi Festival, November fireworks etc. Location-wise, there are buses every 20 minutes into the town centre, and the nearest train station is about a 15 minute walk away from campus. Trains to the seaside (Clacton, Walton) take about 30 minutes, or you can head into or into London which is just an hour in the opposite direction. I feel very supported by staff (we have a personal tutor system who you can go to for anything), lecturers, and the life-long careers services. However, one area of improvement could be increasing funding into the Student Wellbeing and Inclusivity Services as they are very understaffed and can take a long time to get back to students when they are struggling. Having said that, my personal experiences with them have been pretty positive.

I personally found that the fresher's events and all the SU/Society/Sports things run through the year are really important for finding friends. Also the personal tutor system was really nice. Initially I was the only person on my course but I though that was cool too so no real issue there. I just find that the different sectors of the uni are a bit disjointed, there seems to be some lack of communications between departments about things that are going well or could be improved. Overall I have really enjoyed my time here and am mainly just too busy to really notice if something isn't quite right.