University of Stirling

After a few (many) days off the blog, I finally have some time and energy to update. Now I'm gonna talk a bit about the university.

The University of Stirling is settled in a wonderful campus, surrounded by trees, grass, and all sorts of plants. There's also a lake crossed by a bridge (in which a few people had already suffered some injuries) and rabbits and squirrels. And swans. 

I live off campus, but right next to the wall that marks out the area of the campus. We have to walk through the door in the "fence" to go class. It literally takes me 4 minutes to get to class from the main door of my building. Maybe 4 and a few seconds, never had time to count it exactly, but you get the idea :p We have all lectures, or at least 95% of them, in the building called Pathfoot. 

So when you cross the bridge you get to the Atrium and Andrew Miller Building (cafeterias, shops, banks and such, plus library, bookshop, pub, Student's union, etc). It takes 10 minutes tops to walk from Pathfoot to here. Then they also have a cinema downstairs. It's like the shopping mall of a city but in campus. 

Then you can find the Cottrell Building which is very confusing for every student and teacher in this university. If you look closely, you can see it has the shape of DNA, and that fact, instead of making it easier, it just gets things more complicated.

We also have a swimming pool, also known as "the home of the Scottish swimming" or something like that. I haven't tried it yet, but hopefully this weekend :D

Here you can see a picture:

(http://www.open-world.ru/upload/information_system_17/3/9/6/item_396/information_items_property_6062.jpg)

Now, regarding the courses, here is a brief summary of all of them:
PUBP16: Publishing Dynamics: this module is about the process of publishing itself, things to keep in mind when you publish, like copyrights and such.
PUBP17: Marketing, Management and Communications: what you need to know to sell like crazy and make money. This is the module that teaches you that publishing houses are ran by marketers, not editors. Score...
PUBP18: Editorial Practices and Content Creation: who is who and what each one does in a publishing house, how to spot good works and what to do afterwards
PUBP19: Publishing Project, Production and Design: DESIGN, Helvetica, how to creat the book, Helvetica, computers, photoshop, printing, Helvetica, production... and create a book of our own!! From scratch to the very end! Every page, every picture, even the covers! ISN'T THAT AWESOME! So readers, ideas are welcome :D
In my opinion, everything is well organised, and the contents of the modules are quite interesting and extremely useful. What bothers me is the timetable and the group assingments. We only have class Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, which might sound nice, but we are in uni from 10am to 5pm. We only have one hour for lunch, each lecture is 3 HOUR LONG... So sometimes it's too much. Other than that, we're fine.
Well, also except the group assingments. At the end of the semester, we won't have any exams, so we are working our marks out of assingments. Granted, I'm not always very willing to work in groups, but this is going too far. Every assingment so far had to be done in groups, and it's really hard to organise ourselves when some live out of the city, others are just part-time and the rest are working in our days off. I understand that we have to do some group work, get to know other people, learn how to work in a team... but there's a limit. And, personally, the teachers should take into account the different situations of the students in general and see that it's not that easy to fit the timetable so you meet with 3 different groups of people for 3 different assingments...

But everything, as a whole, is very fulfilling :)

And this is pretty much it so far.
Hopefully it won't take me so long until I write here again.
See youuuuuuuuuuuu

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