Everything is great

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The highlight of starting my higher education at QUB has been the support I have received from lecturers, mentors, assistants and peers on my course. I study Broadcast Production and the course is mostly coursework based and is very practical. This is immensely important if I am to get a job by the end of my course and my classmates and I have been immersed in new technologies, software and equipment needed to advance our careers; This is all new to me, and I have found that those around me are very accommodating and patient with me. This has had a great effect on my progress. As well as emotional support, most of my teachers are excellent at giving constructive feedback on assignments and essays. This has helped me improve my grades and gain a better understanding of what is to be expected of me in both an academic and professional setting. I believe my course and the teaching staff are taking the correct and necessary steps to make me fully equipped to entire the film/tv/radio broadcasting sector. However, I do find it extremely prevalent that my course is underfunded and somewhat neglected compared to STEM subjects. Because of how hands-on the course is, we need access to equipment and software to complete assignments. This equipment is often difficult to obtain due to a large number of students across various courses who also need the appliances. This has made assignments extremely difficult and stressful to complete within the deadline when I believe it should be an opportunity to explore our creativity and experiment with new technologies. Moreover, the software of ProTools and DaVinci Resolve is painfully unreliable. Several times files have been corrupted, lost or simply unsaved due to regular software crashes and faulty backup system. I believe this is down to a lack of funding or general lack of regard towards the arts subjects as this could be fixed with regular checks and updates on the iMacs we use in class.

My course is taught mostly face-to-face, with only a handful of classes being taught via zoom due to one of my teachers being sick. I prefer to be taught in class as I find it easier to raise questions and to concentrate when the professor is present. So far, the teaching quality has been up to standard and often follows the same pattern: lectures with slides and an open opportunity to ask relevant questions throughout, seminars with an inviting feel to ask further questions and discuss what we learned in the lecture, finished with an appropriate assignment to display our knowledge on the module. My lectures invite us to ask them any question, with the motto of ‘there are no bad questions’. I have found this to be of immense help and has aided my confidence in the course and the tasks at hand. Last semester, I was in class for 13 hours a week, with classes every day. This was helpful in moulding a routine around my class-time, and gave me the opportunity to practice processing information in a short period of time before having to discuss topics in detail. My lecturers celebrated participation and encouraged us to speak up during class. They were also content to let us experiment with new techniques and were inquisitive about new ways of thinking about our module topics.

To be frank, I do not believe my accommodation meets viable expectations and the value for money is below par. This is mainly down to the maintenance team and their lack of regard. I am staying in the cheapest accommodation at a total of £110 a week, coming to over £4,368.57 for my total stay in elms. I am aware that the Holly Grove buildings are the oldest on campus, and I am an understanding individual, so I expected a few things to be outdated or need maintenance. However, I did not expect things to be as bad as they were. In my room, my window does not close completely, the maintenance team cannot fix the problem as I am on the ground floor and my window is barred to stop people from sneaking into the building, thus denying them the ability to insert a seal. This allows a strong draft to enter my room, particularly at night. The heating is on a timer with the radiators only operating in the early hours of the morning and evening which has caused my room to be extremely cold, especially during the winter months. Furthermore, my bed is concave, the bedframe is metal unlike the other buildings in Elms in which the frame is wooden and has additional storage space under the beds. My bed has metal chains rather than slats to support the mattress and as a result, the bed sinks, making it extremely uncomfortable to sleep on. I have made the Elms Maintenance team aware of this, but they have made no effort to find a solution to the problem. We have also had Wi-Fi issues that still haven’t been fixed, electricity cut-outs in the kitchen that caused a lot of the residents to lose food that was in the fridges without compensation and flooding in the bathroom that was undealt with for days. There was also a period in which the sanitary bins in our shared bathroom were not being emptied by the cleaners which resulted in an overflow of used sanitary products. The positioning of our buildings is secluded, which is nice as it gives us more privacy, however, this comes with the downside of not having any parking spaces for the building and the general car park is constantly full, with some residents (who have already paid for a permit) having to park their cars further from Elms village.