OVERALL UNIVERSITY RATING
Tell us about your overall university experience so far.
If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t choose Brookes. I spent three years here and in my third year I was given only the option to study all double modules. This put me at an automatic disadvantage in terms of grading. My three lowest grades at university were used against me. I WAS NOT TOLD THAT I GRADUATED. The university still hasn’t sent me the relevant post graduate information. I appealed my grades as I was unfairly disadvantaged. This was denied and I was addressed to incorrectly by the academic and student administrator, which makes me wonder if my appeal was ever reviewed as my name and title and displayed on my file along with my student id. How hard is it to get a gender correct in 2020? Not hard at all, there’s a big difference in writing miss and mr.
Three years of hard work and they can’t even send out an email? Everyone I knew found out almost a month before I did.
In general, extremely disappointed and quite ashamed to be associated to this university.
Job Prospects
How does your uni make efforts to increase your employability (careers department, work placements, transferable skills)?
They don’t. I have a degree and I’ve never felt more unemployable. They just send you an email saying you’re not a student and that they’re going to take away your access and then leave you to fend for yourself. (Once you’ve graduated)
If I could give this section 0 stars I would.
The uni doesn’t care about you unless you’re feeding their funds. In my first year at the uni, some woman I’ve never heard of before comes to tell me about how they’re shutting my course down to make it better. Spends a solid two minutes telling me how “don’t worry we will make sure we have enough lecturers for you”. Then proceeded to tell me they’re shutting the course down to make it better for the upcoming years and wanted to hear how we thoguht we should improve it for the upcoming years. Said absolutely nothing about our year. Never saw her again. Why do I care what you’re teaching the people coming in in three years time? Tell me what I’m doing.
Course and Lecturers
What do you like most and least about the way your course(s) are taught?
My lecturers are really good. I. Highly recommend mathematical modelling.. That’s all of the good stuff I have to say really.
The list of bad things goes on to be honest. My course shut down the year I got there, if I knew this, I would have gone to another uni, obviously. The thing about brookes is they really keep you in the dark and misinform students. It should be compulsory to have told students that before enrolling.
Some lectures were very boring like our printed notes being rewritten on a board.
They didn’t have enough lecturers at times and many people would come and go.
I wish we did more interactive learning and worked on more softwares.
Some lecturers would refuse to put things online if you didn’t go in which isn’t fair really when we’re paying for the resources.
This is just the major downside of the entire course and being at brookes really. It was taught at wheatley. Gross. Ugly dull and demotivating campus. The rooms there are really good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s just so ugly and grey. We kept being told we will be moving to headington and never did.
How many contact hours per week do you have?
12
Students' Union
What do you think of your Students' Union in terms of student representation and facilities?
The student union is brilliant. I have nothing but good things to say. They will help you resolve any issue and are a bright bunch of students and staff who work hard to make life better for students. They also give students a voice which is often suppressed by society.
Accommodation
What do you think about the safety, condition, location and cost of your accommodation?
£160+ per week (price goes up by a lot each year) : Absolutely and completely overpriced accommodation. Fairly safe location. The actually safety of your room depends on who you are living with. I was in a medium sized flat and I was stuck living with a stalker who was racist and homophobic. I had to wait months to move rooms and they only moved me when I threaten them that I would call the police because he was stalking me and harassing me, as well as making problems in my flat. Unite students is very much a business with no regards to the people living there. They did nothing when someone in the flat threw up on another persons dishes and didn’t tell them (they ate from the same dish because they didn’t know of the incident). The location is slightly out of the way from campus and the city centre but it’s an easy bus ride to and from. The security are very nice but can’t really do much when there’s an issue besides give warnings. There’s no serious complains procedure and management doesn’t do much when there’s an issue. The T&Cs clearly state in any case of bullying, harassment, racist or antisocial behaviour, the occupant involved in these acts will be removed from the accommodation. This isn’t the case, the rules only seem to apply when they want them to. Parade green is fairly nice, it’s new which is a bonus but the rooms are very small unless you end up with one of the really big ones which there are very few of. It’s very noisy most of the time because of the partying and drinking. There’s a lot of drug use which the staff also don’t seem to do much about. Someone punched a giant hole in the wall of L block last year and you could see how cheap and thin the walls were. There’s a really lovely outdoor seating area but it just becomes a gathering spot for smokers and constantly smells like weed. There’s too little washers and driers, in my opinion, for the number of students living there. There’s a rooftop and a games room and a gym. The rooftop is very nice and so is the games room. The gym is too small and broken equipment takes too long to replace. There’s very little you can really do in there for a gym goer but it does the job for an amateur or someone looking to do indoor cardio. Parade green are quite inconsiderate in regards to parking and dropping things off and moving in, only 20 minutes. Parade green are also overly secretive and withhold a lot of information from students and put their health and safety at risk. The area in general where parade green is located is quite hostile to students. While some students are vet inconsiderate of the neighbours, most are very sensible and don’t disturb the people living nearby. However, there’s a lot of abuse and anger directed towards students from the people living on James Wolfe Road. The neighbours are fowl mouthed and tend to make a scene even at times where there is no issue. The article written about parade green is, to an extent, true however a lot of the article written last year when the site first opened has been inflated to target students and the student lifestyle. Students are generally looked down upon which is quite unfair as this does not apply to the majority of rule-obeying individuals. The parade green kitchen are all different sizes some are ridiculously small and some are too large for the number of room occupants in the flat. The building structure id say is stupid and uneven and poorly designed. It’s a game of luck with this place. You pay the same and you can either get a room for a princess or a pauper. There’s very little privacy in the entire accommodation. The glass finishes look quite modern but are a massive violation of privacy as you can see everything from everywhere. Bit stupid really. The entrance is irritating. If you’re running for a bus, you will miss it.
It’s a visually satisfying place but it has a lot of downs.
Uni Facilities
How good are your university's facilities?
Quite good actually. Brookes is really well built. It’s extremely visually pleasing and there’s a massive library and access to facilities. In terms of equipment I think it’s very well equipped.
Local life
Is your university in a good location in terms of distance to accommodation and local amenities?
No. I studied at wheatley and they stopped the U5X from Cowley to wheatley many years ago. It’s very inconvenient and long. But if you’re in headington it’s a good place to stay in terms of travel time. It’s close to aldi but do you really want to do a weekly shop and carry it all the at back? Hm.
There’s a big tesco but you can’t have a car in Oxford if you’re with brookes. Again, a very very stupid rule which puts many peoples lives at risk in terms of covid 19 because people are constantly potentially spreading infection on public transport and when they need to get home, again, more contamination. And you wonder why the covid cases are so high in Oxford.
The shops are about 30 minutes away in city centre provided there’s no traffic AND if the bus shows up lol. You can pay for the 10 bus to headington shops and that’s about 9 minutes in no traffic.
Societies and Sports
How would you rate the variety of societies/sports?
Brookes has a really good variety of sports however the teams highly just depend on who your friends are with and quite bluntly, the colour of your skin. The university sports teams are highly white supremacist and the teams are founded on classism. The leadership of the teams is passed down from friend to friend each year and is controlled in a hierarchical manner. I’ve seen some really good people not get on sports teams and you’ve got the same average players taking the spot because of their friends being the captains or fitting the “look” of the sport.
Most sports societies are for show and purely gather together for fishies every Wednesday where they get outrageously drunk or drugged. This crowd is particularly rowdy and I’d say are most responsible for the media damage at brookes and represent the minority of students. However, these crowds are generally responsible for the noise and disturbance complaints received by brookes.
If you want to get wasted most days a week and not make it into uni the next morning, I’d highly recommend jointing a sports team or sports social.
Obviously this isn’t the case for all sports societies but it is the general trend. And also, this isn’t the case for everyone in a sports society, just the vast majority.
In terms of societies (other than sports), brookes is quite flexible and there’s a good variety. Most societies are friendly and welcoming and offer acceptance of diversity and different groups of people and accept uniqueness. (Just to clarify I was not talking about the sports societies writhing this paragraph.
Student Support
How good is the support offered by the uni? Think both academic (tutors/feedback) and personal (counselling, etc).
The academic support is really poor. I had one very good adviser help me with a few of my concerns however I’ve been disappointed by the most recent correspondence where I emailed about an urgent query multiple times and was ignored.
The university offers counselling and the counsellor is very good.
A lot of the time though I think that the mental support is highly lacking . Students who aren’t currently able are pushed to continue and stay on when they’re not in the mental place to do so and they waste their loans just to drop out part way through because they really can’t do it. And this is where you can tell that the university is a business and just want money.
