Linguistics and English Language Integrated PhD

Newcastle University

Everyone is so friendly and settling in to the uni was a breeze. The surrounding area to the university it perfect for pretty much everything, never found there to be a lack of things to do!

Newcastle - the city and university - is a great place to study, especially for linguistics. Staff are enthusiastic about their field and the language/linguistics communities are passionate and engaging. There's a strong focus on representation - of signed languages, underresearched groups like the elderly - and research skills such as critical reading and (optionally) presentation. In my language classes, we focus on political and cultural events (such as east German identity or French graffiti) and generally classes refine your language and encourage consistency. Student support is fairly good. I've been able to customise my modules to take more of one subject, wellbeing is easy to access, and feedback is becoming more and more important. The city itself is affordable with something for everyone - green spaces near the campus stand out the most. The SU is constantly advertising new opportunities. In terms of improvements, I was disappointed to see the German faculty decrease following university-wide cuts. The demand seems to be fairly low compared to other languages unfortunately.

As a university, Newcastle has really good facilities and an amazing campus. All the areas of campus are always well kept and tidy with people working on keeping it clean frequently. One of the only things I think Newcastle could improve on is the student union. Aside from a Wetherspoons, a co-op and very few food establishments there isn't much advertised or available which I believe if improved would have a largely positive impact for students.

Newcastle uni is a great place to study, the main part of the campus itself is beautiful, as well as the teaching staff being incredibly helpful and friendly. It could be improved by having better temperature regulation in lecture rooms.

There are some really pretty parts of the campus, and lots of great places for studying including the main library and the language library. There are lots of places to eat on campus too and they always have vegetarian/vegan options. There are also loads of societies to join and a wide range of things to do outside of uni in the city. Depending on the subject(s) you study, sometimes teaching isn't always the best and it can be difficult to do a joint/combined course; it might not be true for all courses but from my experience the schools don't communicate well with each other and can cause lots of clashes on the timetable, restricted module choices, or confusion about what you can and can't study.