What's Student Life Like?

John a paramedic student talks about student life

Coming into higher education and going to university is completely different to being at school or college. I came from sixth form as my last part of education and I have noticed a massive and fantastic change from that.

I've got complete independence now, everything that I put into university I get out, it's absolutely equal. I can manage my own learning. I can choose when I want to do all my own work, there's no ‘this is your homework tonight it needs to be in tomorrow', you've got a two month deadline and you manage your work within that time.

You also get to manage your own finance, obviously you get loans and you can get grants and you get the choice to spend that how and when you like. I still live at home with my parents and commute to university. There are fantastic road and rail networks and I've got a lot of friends who live either on site at Glenside in halls or locally in houses. To be honest there's no massive difference, I'd be happy either way.

We've got a great friendship group from the course and within the university. One of my main concerns when I came to university was that it would be difficult to start making new friendship groups, to make a new social network but at the end of the day everybody's in the same boat, everybody's coming here and making new friends and leaving their old friends at home, having to make a new social network, getting used to being somewhere new so everybody wants to make friends, it's not just you and everybody understands that.

Being independent means you have to manage your own workload and make sure you are not doing too much on your studies and too much part time work and burning yourself out.