The mother of all inferiority complexes

Last week Felix published an article discussing the differences in workload between Oxbridge and Imperial. ‘Who works harder?’ seemed to be the question it was asking. It threw lots of figures at the reader and seemed to suggest that Oxbridge gives students more contact hours and was much better value for money. The comments online erupted. Imperial’s longer terms were pointed out as an explanation for reduced contact times and there were debates on the quality of the course content, particularly amongst the physicists.

This all really annoys me. Imperial students seem to be incapable of getting over an Oxbridge rejection. Everyone seems to complain and beall “Oh we work so hard,” or “Aren’t we so underappreciated?” Or my personal favourite, “People don’t fill out the NSS properly and league tables are just rubbish.” We seem to have a constant fixation with how hard we supposedly work and an innate bitterness at Oxbridge for not letting us in. It’s bizarre and no other university is daft enough to do it.

Firstly, everyone thinks they work hard. The hours you work are perfectly comparable to the hours many people work in a job. It’s a cliché, but nothingworth achieving has been easy to do so. I don’t know what you want to do with your life, and dare I say it, nor do you. But whatever it is, if you want to be successful at it, you’re going to have to work hard to get there. Get used to it now.

Secondly, Imperial is one of the best further education institutions in the world. Let’s say it’s the third best in the UK. That’s pretty good. So what if Oxford and Cambridge claim spots one and two, you’re still at a university which consistently ranks in the top ten world-wide. When you graduate and go looking for a job, nobody is ever going to say, “We would give you the job, but frankly, we don’t think Imperial is a serious enough university.” Imperial’s courses are different to Oxbridge’s and this is good. I’ll have different skills and experiences to engineering graduates from there. There is no ‘gold standard’ on what to do in a course. Let’s all take the opportunity to learn from some of the best in the world and not waste time complaining.

There is research to be done on how different university courses differ all over the world. Last week’s article tried it, but with lots of short comings which it was frank about. For now though, let’s enjoy our time at Imperial and all its unique qualities. Enjoy living and working in central London and take advantage of everything it can offer. Write for Felix! Take up a sport. Challenge yourself. Don’t be obsessed with being ‘as good as Oxbridge’ because it’s inane and frankly it’s boring.

George tweets as @georgebutcher