There is always room for improvement

This week I finished my degree. “Congratulations, you have completed Mech Eng!” said the figurative game graphic as I answered the last question of my presentation. Somehow I managed to do four years of my degree without failing an exam (hopefully anyway, there’s still chance), and probably getting a 2:1 overall. Thanks for that.

Would I recommend the Imperial experience? Yes, but that’s not to say that Imperial doesn’t struggle in so many ways.

We all laugh at the student satisfaction survey. “People don’t like no longer being best,” “Imperial students are just whiny,” and “we’ve just got really high standards,” are all excuses I’ve heard wheeled out. But the reality is that many students are not happy, Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and other good universities consistently outperform us. Students are not enjoying themselves, and so why would they rate their university highly?

The gender imbalance was the biggest worry for me when I chose Imperial. It seems silly to say that now: I haven’t struggled to make friends and have kept a wonderful girlfriend, but it does fundamentally change how life works when a large part of society is just cut out of your life. I hope that Imperial is trying to rectify this – I know the new “Design Engineering” course has 40% female applicants. I want Imperial to commit to end this imbalance, for the sake of both accessibility and reducing the testosterone-filled environment that we live in.

This leads me onto the second problem with Imperial: mental health. Two weeks ago Felix published the results of a student-lead Union survey showing that Imperial not only had a huge number of students struggling with their mental health, but that it was higher than other universities surveyed by the NUS. A few weeks before, we published my own investigation where I interviewed many students who had struggled in some way with mental health; the stories behind the statistics. I found that there was support for students and some great people doing great work. But there is very little strategy, very little organisation and very little recognition at the most senior levels that the environment here causes people to become ill. This needs recognising, accepting and then changing. The problem is that we make students ill in the first place, not that we struggle to help them when they are.

The way that departments teach across Imperial seems to vary hugely. Partly down to the subjects’ nature, but also down to the individuals in that department. As innovative as the research may be, the teaching methods are right out of the Victorian era. Most of my time was spent in a lecture theatre trying not to go to sleep. If you were lucky you got a tutorial. If you were very lucky the tutor cared enough to teach, most of the time not.

Whilst my project work in 3rd/4th year has been fantastic, the teaching is mediocre at best; my typical state comprehensive school was more innovative in its teaching methods. Dep Rep meetings seem to be focused on when computer rooms are open, and cafes – for a university to be relevant in the 21st century you need to radically change how teaching is done, for soon it won’t be possible to cruise on a reputation as employers realise that university is just an overly elaborate sorting mechanism.

Finally, Imperial needs to better work with its student union, and the Union with its students. We’re very fortunate to have a well organised and structured student union. It runs popular bars, allows every student to use the clubs and societies that are the backbone of the Imperial social life and isn’t going bust.

But what is “The Union”? For many it is this mythical beast that inhabits the back offices of level 2M in Beit. How can the sabbaticals have a personal relationship with the presidents and committee of 350 clubs? Never mind the entire Dep Rep network, an often overlooked part of union work. Too often we don’t feel part of our own student union: this very paper, which is a society of the Union, paid for by the Union with an editor elected along with the sabbatical team in Union elections, has a separate “Union Page”, which is bizarre. This came to a head when the rugby team actively worked against the Union’s efforts to minimise the College or police sanctions into public accusations by The Telegraph, rather than seeing them as a method of support and help.

You might read this and think that I haven’t enjoyed Imperial. This is not true, I have done. However an article about how wonderful Imperial is and what a great place it is to discover new stuff doesn’t make as a good a read.

Imperial College is genuinely full of opportunities and I’ve had a great time taking advantage of as many as I can, but there is always room for improvement. Go on Imperial, you can do it.