Our collection of real, honest student reviews of unis and courses is the largest in the UK, and help you make well-informed decisions about your future. Student reviews also form the basis of our annual Whatuni Student Choice Awards(WUSCAs), which highlight great work carried out by institutions for their students.
2023 WUSCA winners
One of the best aspect of the uni is its a smaller uni right in the centre of Dundee .
My course is a mixture of blended learning and I'm enjoying that point of view
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The university is in the centre of Dundee making it a prime location for everyone to access. The facilities certainly for computing courses are top of the range and contain everything needed for your course and more. There is a good variety of unions and the SU seems extremely relaxed.
With a hands on approach to hacking, the hacking course is a great introduction to the large variety of hacking techniques and methodology required to get your foot in the door for everything hacking.
Halls was an interesting experience, large flat with people all on similar courses for a cheap price directly in the city center so a few minutes from anything you might need, including the university. Cheap and WiFi easily over 200/200 at any given time.
Best Social life, society's Worst Finances
It's a good start to my course
Could be cheaper nut really nice
Lots of true passion people in the game development field. Creating games is truly a unique Uni experience.
Online combine taught learning is great!
I have asked lecturers and students to stop stalking me and they won't.
Lectures stalk me in my room for research which makes it hard to concentrate as in I have to go back and read something's again and they have told other students and staff where I live and are stalking me even though I have asked them to stop.
Masters degree in Fine Art
The abilities to openly debate encourage and challenge both peers and lecturers
N a
Na
Good
Good
I really wish I didn't decide to study at Abertay. While the pandemic has certainly resulted in a steep decline in the quality of the courses, I already started to notice issues with the place before it took hold. There is little point in choosing to study game design when you get barely any instruciton from teachers and end up learning pretty much everything useful by yourself, which you can do without Abertay. Student support is terrible, and if you can manage to see someone, they usually tell you that they don't know how to help you. I was looking at studying abroad in my second year - I was met by apathy when talking to the pertinent department, and when I proposed trying to reach out to institutions in a specific country, I was told that I would have to do it all myself because they weren't able to help me facilitate it at all. Any complaints about lecturer conduct fell on deaf ears. The campus itself is servicable. There's a couple nice modern parts that are stuck on to the side of a very brutalist block. During the course of my degree, they've unfortunately done away with most of the on-campus cafés as well as a large, open, sillicon-valley-style working space for game design students. The library is small, but a good place to meet and study. I hear most students trying to do actual research went up to Dundee's library though. Abertay doesn't pay for any of the top academic paper websites, so getting access to studies and resources for my dissertation was something that, like most things at Abertay, I was left to tackle alone. Apart from the aforementioned changes to the facilities, they were okay. I always did most of my work outside of the university and rarely used the available hardware. About halfway though my course they changed the way that software was handled, and since then found it very difficult to get apps to load properly. Abertay's student union is nonexistent. There's a small students association which handles some university affairs, but getting actual help from them is based on if they like your politics or not. Most people go up to the union at Dundee university. Student life is okay in Dundee if you like drinking and nightclubs. Aside from that there's not very much to do in the city itself apart from the V&A. I found myself going back down to Edinburgh most weekends for this reason.
The course content was not that great. There were a small handful of classes which were interesting, but most were in the end not very useful when it comes to finding a job in the industry. In third year you get to work on a project with an industry partner, which was actually pretty good experience, and was one of the best classes we had. Despite all of the supposed industry links that Abertay likes to tout as having in all of their marketing materials, actual industry experience such as placements and internships are very rare and I got the feeling that they weren't as well connected as I first thought when applying to the uni. The honours preparation classes in third year and the actual honours classes in fourth year were the best part of the course, because the whole thing was very open ended and you could do something that had less to do with game design and something more applicable to the general creative industries - depending on what you wanted to do after you graduate. While I had a couple of really nice lecturers (Honours supervisor was also great), many of the teachers were very rude and condescending. One of my third year teachers' feedback for my final assignment was nothing but complaints about what I did wrong. In fourth year, many of us complained when our main lecturer did nothing but make fatalist comments about us not having much of a chance to get a job - in a class about careers no less! The class was pretty useless anyway, and didn't do anything to help students prepare for the world of work. I'm actually very lucky in that I've managed to find a job really quickly, but that was done with work that I did completely separately from university itself. None of the work that I did at Abertay was good enough to put in a portfolio - I'd actually be embarrassed to show it to a potential employer because of how low the bar was set in some of our classes. Most people don't have clear career prospects, and I think it's pretty obvious that we were all sold down the river on a lie. I'm actually going to repeat some advice that was given to me by a visiting professional to the university: Game Design degrees are worth virtually nothing. If you want to get into games, study something unrelated which has good prospects while working on a games portfolio on the side - your chances will be much better. Don't study at Abertay.
I love that it’s small as initially I didn’t want to go. The staff are good when in your course however the lack of a union or bigger side leaves students feeling excluded. Unless your in a sport or a club you never really meet anyone apart from people in your course. Other than that it’s a great uni. At the end of the day it’s the degree to the uni
A lot of it is now online which personally I don’t like. The in person classes are good but often just repeat what are on the slides previously given