The Student Experience

The Student Voice - Student essay competition 2006

The English Subject Centre’s student essay competition, run in spring 2006, was a great success, and you can read the entries below. In gathering first-hand experience from students we were impressed by the number and quality of essays on the set topic of:

How does your experience of your course compare with any expectations you may have had?

Together with the external assessor, we found that reading the essays gave us valuable insights into the student experience of English and the personal sacrifices, tribulations and joys of studying in higher education. The winner was Rachel Davies, an Open University student.

Winning Entry

Rachel Davies - Open University

'Even those aspects of the course which had formerly seemed grassy knolls of comfort...became nettle patches of realigned thinking'

Runner up

Michael Aicken - Open University

'My experience of studying literature has not been to find my expectations unfulfilled but, like the wishes granted in a fairytale, to find them satisfied in unexpected ways.'

Other Entries

David Cardenas-Mazurkiewicz - Royal Holloway, University of London

'The seminars were not just based on facts and figures, meaningless pages in a dusty book. They were vibrant and alive, driven by young minds.'

Elizabeth Chapman - Edinburgh University

'I was used to success; but if my sixth form had been a small pond in which I was a fat fish, Edinburgh made a minnow of me.'

Sue Cunningham - Open University

'After discussions on varieties of English, gender and language and English at work, I find myself continually noticing and reassessing my own, and other people's, language and my reactions to it.'

Lesley Edwards - Open University

'I caught myself reciting Coleridge's Kubla Khan under my breath whilst making breakfast one morning: 'caverns measureless to man' for some reason sprang to mind.'

Alex Hobbs - Anglia Ruskin University

'For me, studying literature has been marked by a number of epiphanies.  Moments when, either in lectures, research, or seminar discussion, a veil has been drawn back, and suddenly understanding has hit.'

Tawonga Kayira - Suffolk College

'Some of the exhilarating and interesting skills that I have acquired (and never imagined I could) are mind-boggling.'

Shaun Livingston - Nottingham University

'[My] experience of the course at University proved harder than I thought it would be, more stressful than I thought it would be, and the end product (of the first semester, anyway) yielded only 62%.'

Carleen Poppy - Open University

'I have to work round meetings and visits to school of which I am the chair of the board of governors, and because of the Special School closures and reorganization that is happening in our town I have a lot of work to do.'

Steve Ransom - Suffolk College

'As a 'mature' student, I had worried that I would be Grand-dad to a bunch of eighteen year-olds who would bombard me with humorous questions about life during the war.'

Gabriel Wilhelm Schenk - University of Wales Aberystwyth

'I thought, for some reason, that my life would be exactly like Murder She Wrote. The first assignment would culminate in me tapping away furiously on a type-writer whilst smoking a fat Cuban cigar.'

Tanya Sinclair - University of Plymouth

'After a year of working in a job where the management were about as exciting and inspiring as Miss Havisham was to Pip, I realised that I intensely missed and loved English'

Nicholas Swager, Suffolk College

'Due to my tutors' influence I began to see that a firmly held belief was like wearing a set of blinkers - it restricted aesthetic appreciation, lessened enrichment and reduced understanding.'

Ruth Warburton - Open University

'I'm sure I've scarred my nine year old son for life making him...listen to the audio version of As You Like It.'

Graham Williams - Open University

'I learned for the first time the possibility of objective study: that one can, for example, study religions without having to be religious.'

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