OVERALL UNIVERSITY RATING
Tell us about your overall university experience so far.
Overall I have enjoyed my university experience so far, but there is definitely plenty of room for improvement. I have made some great...
University rating
Tell us about your overall university experience so far.
Overall I have enjoyed my university experience so far, but there is definitely plenty of room for improvement. I have made some great friendships so I don't really have any issues socially, but I think that the lack of clubs, organised social events, and places to hang out (such as how many other universities have campus bars, for example) mean that the students who are more quiet or shy may find the social experience at Ravensbourne a bit less engaging than at other universities. I also would greatly appreciate more theory work and stronger work placement encouragement.
Facilities
How good are your university's facilities?
For my course, digital film production, the facilities are pretty good as we have access to lots of really good quality filming equipment as well as editing suites.
Student support
How good is the support offered by the uni? Think both academic (tutors/feedback) and personal (counselling, etc).
There is good support offered if you actively seek it out. I have found that the only real way to get feedback on work or get any kind of help is to approach the lecturers and talk to them one on one at the end of a lecture.
Students' union
What do you think of your Students' Union in terms of student representation and facilities?
I don't know a lot about the goings on of the students' union, but they did organise some fun events for freshers' week, such as a rooftop party and going to see The Lion King on the west end. Since then, however, it would be nice to have more social events, organised activities and societies.
Local life
Is your university in a good location in terms of distance to accommodation and local amenities?
Ravensbourne has a really good location in terms of amenities - there are plenty of shops and places to eat around thanks to being right next to the O2. Another very convenient thing is that the uni is right next to North Greenwich Tube Station, so getting into central London is quick and easy, and no matter where students live the uni is pretty easy to get to.
Societies and Sports
How would you rate the variety of societies/sports?
0/10. This is the one major issue I have with Ravensbourne. There are no sports whatsoever and very, very few societies. I know some students who are trying to start up new societies, but the university makes this quite a difficult process and so at the moment there are still hardly any. We don't have access to a sports hall, field or gym of any kind as part of our campus, and so sadly I don't think we will ever have any sports teams or clubs. This really should be changed as basically all other universities that I've seen have vibrant social scenes with diverse clubs available for students with all sorts of interests. It just makes university life much more enjoyable and gives a better sense of social cohesion.
Lecturers and teaching quality
What do you like most and least about the way your course(s) are taught?
What I like most about my course so far is the amount of practical learning - I am halfway through my second term at uni and am currently working on my sixth film. I think that learning by doing is really the way to go with something like filmmaking, and I particularly like that we are able to experiment and make mistakes at this early stage, since our first year films are not graded, so we make them purely with the purpose of learning from the experience.
What I like least about the way my course is taught is the complete lack of in-depth theory. While I think practical work is definitely the most important and I'm glad that Ravensbourne places so much emphasis on that, but I think there could definitely be a better balance and our lectures could be a lot more in-depth. For example, during our Film Language & Technologies unit last term, we had a few introductory lectures at the beginning that went over the basics of visual language and how the different elements of a scene can be used to communicate the story, mood, etc. I found these really interesting and assumed that these broad introductions would be elaborated upon and explored much further in future lectures, but this never happened. The same thing is happening now in our Creative Storytelling unit. I was really excited for this unit and the recommended books on the reading list made it seem like we would be exploring topics like the anatomy of story, how to craft an effective story arc, character arc, etc. and different narrative theories. However, again these subjects were barely glossed over in lectures, and fascinating concepts such as Plato's Allegory of the Cave will be brought up in passing but never explored.
How many contact hours per week do you have?
14
Career prospects
How does your uni make efforts to increase your employability (careers department, work placements, transferable skills)?
We do have optional CV and employability workshops sometimes, and we are encouraged to find work experience outside of uni, however we aren't really given much help with actually finding or organising this. Certainly not in first year at least, but I haven't really heard of anything like that in later years either. I know at some other universities they have actual work placement modules as part of their curriculum, such as a placement year or term, and I think something like this would be extremely beneficial for us and should definitely be added to the curriculum, especially since one of Ravensbourne's main selling points that it markets itself on is its industry connections and employability rates.