What's student life at Boston University like?

What does student life look like at University of Edinburgh?

• I'm Internantional sophomore year student. Studying at Northeastern Univeristy(Boston,MA) currently. From upcoming September, I'm doing full year study abroad at Edinburgh. How is UK educational system different from US? What should I focus on?

• Answer:

  I'm sure they will go over a lot of the details about the differences when you arrive but I will give a quick rundown of my experience as a student at Edinburgh. I went into the Informatics program which is the Edinburgh version of Computer Science. There are some notable differences between an American University and the UK system. The grading scale is shifted down by about 30 points. In the US an A is 90 - 100, B 80 - 89, C 70-79 etc. The UK system grades on a scale that is similar in scale but in a different range, a very rough approximation can be made by shifting everything down by 30, so an A is 70 and above, B is ~ 50 - 59 etc. Your school can give you details about how the numbers translate when you bring the courses you took in Edinburgh back to the US. The grading on exams tends to be subtractive, so you start with 100 points and chunks of points are taken away for every non-perfect portion of your answer. It tends to average out so the distribution of grades is similar to the US. I was able to get a higher overall GPA at Edinburgh in comparison to UCSD, this may be due in large part to the assignment style of the US vs UK, which I'll talk about next. At UCSD a lot of my courses consisted of some combination of 5 - 10 Assignments, 4 - 8 Quizzes, a midterm and final for each course. We were on the quarter system at UCSD so a course was 10 weeks, plus a week for finals. The proportion of the grade varied a lot between classes, some were weighted heavily on the assignments(40%), others didn't give credit for anything but exams. At Edinburgh every class that I took with one exception had this exact set-up: 75% Of your grade was decided by the final exam. 25% Of your grade was decided by one assignment/essay/project. The only exception to this rule was a math class that didn't count problem sets toward your grade, it was 100% final. You will be staying for a year, so your grade for the entire year will most likely be decided by the final exam in the May - June Timeframe. Instead of about 4 classes per quarter/semester in Edinburgh it is common to take 6 classes at once. This is because most classes last for an entire year, which are split into two semesters, but the second half is a continuation of the first. I didn't stay for a year so I can't say much on this, other than good luck! The coursework for my time there dealt a lot with theoretical study, there wasn't a whole lot of practical skills acquisition, but I came from an engineering school where I was used to doing a lot of programming. The big takeaway from all this is that you are left to work at your own pace in the UK, no one is pushing you to keep up with the class, even more so than at an American university. In the US you will be poked and prodded in different ways to keep up: assignments, quizzes, midterms, problem sets. That all went away for my coursework at Edinburgh, all you had at your disposal was the lecture slides, the lectures themselves, and sheer willpower. You might have tutors to work with but I didn't. It is extremely easy to fall behind or procrastinate. I would recommend finding a community of people to work with, or study/drink with early in the year. Also, enjoy the beauty of the city, it really is remarkable, I was surprised by just how gorgeous(AND CONFUSING) the city was until the day I left. Oh and the drinking culture is huge in the UK, don't be surprised if the school passes out wine bottles to encourage socializing. Just enjoy yourself and keep up with your classes, and you'll be guaranteed a great time!