College

Before I start extracting the thoughts from my mind onto this page, I would like to point out that I have not done research for this, this is purely from my own experiences from my time in college.

My first year of college was actually last year, it was basically a redo of my GCSE's because I did not feel as though I preformed well enough the first time around, with the added bonus that the college pays you.. which leads me to my first point. Payment.

With the NPTC group of colleges in the United Kingdom you are set to be paid a total of 60 pounds every two weeks which would go towards supporting you with equipment, food and, travel. I found this pretty reasonable because you don't exactly need boatloads of money. That being said, they didn't actually start my payments until pretty much the last week of term, which meant my I was having to get money out of nowhere in order to pay for those things. Granted, my dad was able to help, but he didn't have much money to spare at the time since he was still looking for work. This lead to me walking to college most days, in all weather which would take around an hour. This was not a good experience at all. Every time I went to the student services in the college they always had another excuse, it was evident I was not the only one going through this, because a lot of my close friends were in the same position. Granted, the college does what is called a back payment which meant that all the money got paid into my bank, but at that point it was pointless, sure it came in handy but I would have been much better of if they actually paid me when they were supposed to. All in all, I will pin this down to a very negative aspect of my time in college.

On this particular subject I have sort of mixed feeling. Every lecturer is different, they all have different teaching methods and personalities, there will always be at least one you don't get along with. For me it was maths, now, I've never really been good with maths, I can do it but not to the highest standard. My lecturer obviously couldn't handle this and singled me out almost every lesson. It's important to note I suffer with really bad social anxiety, so as you can probably guess I did not take it well at all. I would return home every day feeling worse than I did going in, and went in dreading the thought of being in their class. This was indeed not the same with all of them, the majority of them understood what I was like and actually catered to my needs, if it wasn't for them, I would of never had any hope of a college education. They would always make sure I was okay and when I wasn't they would try their best to help me. All in all, I was happy with this subject, definitely more so than the previous one.

I know I have already mentioned the formidable student services, but I do believe this particular area deserves its own little section as it were. In the simplest terms imaginable; they were absolutely no help, you lost your lanyard? Missed a payment? Sucks to be you because they're not going to sort it. The amount of times I went to them with problems they said they'd sort and have nothing sorted was ridiculous. I don't even think there's much else to say about them, in my own opinion they had no idea what they were doing and never remembered an issue they said they'd fix. This was definitely the most negative thing about the college.

I know this isn't exactly much, and I do apologise, this is my first time using this site and honestly wanted to get a feel of how it works, I will definitely make another delving into my experiences with the college.

* I would like to add, I am now in my second year of college and there has been a weirdly dramatic experience, nothing is yet to have gone wrong.