Goodbye Imperial, and thanks for having me

I’ve now spent four years studying as an undergraduate at Imperial. That feels like a long time – I don’t really remember the anxious teenager who arrived here in 2011, who was unsure of how to organise a weekly shop and do the laundry. I seem to have regressed in my organisation of chores, as my life has filled up with report writing, project work and the whole ‘clubs and societies’ thing on which I sometimes spend more time than my degree.

I’ve had a great time at Imperial. It’s worked me hard, and caused me stress near exams or when coursework seems to just pile up on top of me. It’s marked me down for the most inauspicious of reasons, and some of the lecturers need to be put back in the 1980s from whence they came – but after all that it’s served me well.

I think back to the worries I had when I arrived, the horrors I’d heard from people back home about coming to London. It’ll be too expensive, they’ll make you work too hard, there won’t be any women, it will be full of international students, they’re all Oxbridge rejects – none of those things have actually come to fruition, certainly not as a problem. People who go on about ‘the ratio’ are probably boring so it’s an easy way to find out if you’d want to keep talking to them. It is expensive, but worth it - Imperial’s bursary scheme does a good job of helping those who need it, and I’ve loved being able to make friends with people who come from completely different backgrounds to me, all over the globe.

It’s bizarre to think how different my life would be now if I had gone to a different University. I could so easily have not made the grades and ended up at Southampton, or had an offer from Cambridge and been pressured into going there. The people I know now would be carrying on without me and I’d (hopefully) be with a completely different group of friends, who are now just strangers to me.

But the biggest thing University has taught me is that it’s about the experience, not just the grade. The difference between a physical University and an online course is the people. The academics and staff who help me with my projects, the members of the clubs I’ve been in over the past four years, the lifelong connections.

These are the things that are unique to University and that Imperial somehow manages to get so very right. I learn so much more from working with other people on a project, whether on my course or as part of a society, than I do from any amount of time reading a textbook.

As we build up Imperial West, move students to live in North Acton and become more ruthless with what we fund and how, we shouldn’t forget this. We somehow need to get clubs and societies available to North Acton and Imperial West students. We need to keep people working together, and not create a two-tier Imperial. The Union needs to play its role in that, but also College needs to recognise the importance of it and help it to happen, or the students there will not have the experience that they deserve.