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Essex Uni or leicester

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
edited March 27 in Work & Study
Have to make a decision soon, dont suppose any one can help, to give me some insight or someone who has been to Essex uni can tell me what its like.

any help greatly appreaciated.
Post edited by JustV on

Comments

  • Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I posted this a week or so ago. Hope it's useful for you.


    As someone who lived ten minutes walk from the Essex University campus for 15 years I think I'm in a prime position to actually answer this.
    The campus itself is around half and hour away from the town centre. Taxis are quite expensive and the public transport is terrible. Besides the town centre in Colchester is pretty damn awful.

    Anyway . . . . .

    The Campus
    Small but perfectly formed. A few of the older buildings are disgusting examples of dodgy sixties architecture - big grey towers etc, but the newer accommodation is good. The grounds are great with lakes, trees, lots of grass etc (if you like that sort of thing). The campus is completely self contained with everything you could want on site. That means that you never actually have to leave the campus, should you so wish.

    The campus has a larger than normal proportion of overseas students. This is mainly because of the poor reputation of the county of Essex in general and Colchester specifically amongst people in the UK. The result of this is that it’s busy most of the year as people don’t go home for vacations (apart from the summer).

    For a small uni the nightlife on campus is quite good. A large number of people from other unis coming home for holidays choose to go there rather than the town. All the usual range of bars, clubs and restaurants can be found on site, but as the uni is small the number of these is not particularly high.

    The Town
    Colchester, like so many other towns, suffers from serious 'small town syndrome'. Okay - so it does have a big castle, but that’s no excuse for people thinking it is anything other than a complete backwater. Examples of small town attitudes include institutionalised racism and homophobia, not to mention a distrust of students and outsiders in general. (An ethnic minority is defined as someone from Chelmsford)

    Anyone who has been in the least bit successful moves away as soon as they can (yours truly included). The result of this is that the town centre on most nights of the week is mostly filled with brain-dead Gary Ravers looking for a fight or brain-dead Squaddies looking for a fight. ‘Cruising’ in a souped up XR3i is very popular.

    The two or three clubs are exactly as you’d expect. Filled with everyone from little kids to old grannies. Dress codes are, without exception, very tight: no jeans, no trainers, no tops without collars. End result - everyone looks exactly the same. The music is your standard commercial dance shit played by a forty year old balding DJ wearing a Hawaiian shirt because he’s so CRAAAAAZY! Lots of speaking over music with shouts such as ‘Oi Oi!’ and the obligatory ‘Put your hands in the air!’. You get the idea? I would not recommend going to a club in Colchester to anyone. Full stop.

    Some of the local bars are okay - but they always get horrendously busy very early on in the evening. Most have now adopted a similarly ridiculous dress code to the clubs.

    So in summary. . . . . .
    The campus looks really bad but is actually quite good if you don’t mind it being so small.
    The town has nothing to commend it - other than the world’s largest Norman castle.

    You might be interested in the following line from Colchester’s finest export, Blur. It’s from their song Coffee and TV and is widely regarded as a comment on Colchester.
    ‘Do you go to the country? It isn’t very far. People there will try to hurt you, because of who you are.’

    But then what do I know? I wasn’t born in Colchester and felt that I never really fit in. But then I could both read and write, and my parents weren’t brother and sister - so I was always going to stand out.
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