I love the university as a whole. There is an incredible atmosphere and I feel it's quite relaxed and never appears too snobby. I have been here a year and I am still hearing about lovely services provided by the university. My favourite to date was learning about the Converge service that is based at York. St. John that offers educational courses to mental health service users in the arts as a form of therapeutic recovery. It uses the YSJ facilities and staff members along with many YSJ student volunteers. I think the staff are all extremely friendly and inclusive. I have seen members of staff working across the campus who have varying additional needs and seeing them included in the workforce is incredible to see. My experience so far with staff from the library has been excellent and I have received great support when I have needed to use their services. Overall I am very pleased with my experience so far at YSJ and am so glad I chose to come and study here. I love the small sized university campus as I attended quite a large university for my undergraduate degree.

My course is going well and I love the area. Although sometimes it has been frustrating as they were reluctant to a lot of on campus face-to-face lectures and instead resorted to a lot of online teaching. This was very disappointing as I am studying a healthcare course where I will be engaging with my patients/service users face to face and feel we are not getting the same experience when being taught online. My cohort has brought this issue up with the teaching staff and there was some considerations accepted and implemented but overall it still remained online for a lot of the course. I find myself conflicted about the quality of the teaching. Most of our lecturers are excellent and give us excellent lectures and encourage great discussion. They keep their teaching materials up to date with relevant resources and references. You can see their passion for the topics shining through and it's very inspiring. On the other hand there are a couple of staff members that I find their teaching to be a bit lazy. They read directly off slides and don't go into further detail. They show us a video for an hour, encourage a 10 minute discussion and then finish the 3 hours seminar more than 1.5 hours early. They are very nice people but a lot of my cohort feel that we rarely learn anything from them and any experience they share are never useful, only ever self promoting and it does not prepare us for when we will be graduated and working in the field. Certainly there is a LOT of emphasis on theoretical aspects of occupational therapy provided and I understand that a lot of the practical element will be learnt and taught to us when we go on practice placement. However, this is dependent on if you receive a good placement where you are given those opportunities. Many of the cohort are often placed on practive placements were they are not supported and they do not feel they learn much. We have received very little practical teaching on this course. We have had very few "lab or practical" sessions and I do not feel prepared upon graduating. I understand the area is extremely broad and they cannot teach us everything in 2 years but I think more practice opportunities in a student environment would be extremely beneficial.

No

Small university which gives it a good vibe, all the teachers know your name.

Online lectures and constant support are really good

No