A Levels/College/6th Form - How is it?

anant_shah94 said:
Funny you should mention that, I was going to change Physics to something like Latin or German, but I thought nah **** it.

To anyone who thinks they might like physics: do it! It's hard, but it's far more interesting than the other subjects that I'm doing

EDIT: The last 6 posts all have the same sig :p
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I know you aren't going to do any languages at all now, and this is for everyone;

If you are going to do a foreign language study, it should be Spanish! Next to English, it's the most common & important language of the 21st century. French, German or Latin are all completely useless languages with little reach in the business and academic world.
 
anant_shah94 said:
Funny you should mention that, I was going to change Physics to something like Latin or German, but I thought nah **** it.

To anyone who thinks they might like physics: do it! It's hard, but it's far more interesting than the other subjects that I'm doing

EDIT: The last 6 posts all have the same sig :p
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I've signed up to do physics at my college for two years now, and they keep dropping the ****ing subject because they can't convince enough people to do it. Rage. :(

Edit: Speaking of which, before attending a new college, talk to current A2 students and make sure their timetabling is relatively sound. It's unbelievably stressful when your college introduces clashes between two subjects you've been studying for a year.
 
Nymins said:
Started an Access course in Social Sciences. Seems interesting so far, bit of a mind **** at times though, particularly the Psychology classes.

I echo the comments above about talking to people. I didn't know anyone on the course, but just start talking to anyone as soon as possible in class, makes things much easier the sooner you do it.
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What do you find challenging about it? I've just graduated with a degree in Sociology and Criminology, did a few Psychology modules aswell. Be interesting to see what you think about the course.
 
I'm doing my A2's this year - phys chem maths further maths and DT.
w11tho said:
It's great to see so many of you guys doing physics. Out of curiosity - would you not prefer to be given a rigorous introduction to the basics, rather than a watered down version of the fancy advanced stuff? I.e. would you not prefer to be able to calculate the time it would take for a ball to roll down a hill or model the elliptic orbits of the planets; rather than being able to reel off the different flavours of quark or to quote E=mc^2?
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Well you can work out how long it takes a ball to roll down a hill... if you ignore the fact that the ball starts to rotate.
The basic mechanics problems get covered in physics and maths, and personally, I think we get a fairly good introduction to the basics - the physics course includes Forces, momentum, circular motion, fields, electric stuff, radioactivity, plus an optional unit (at A2) plus similar stuff (and the quark stuff) at AS. I think spending much longer on any of the specific topics would get repetitive, and it's great to get so much variety in a course.
 
I miss school to be honest but nothing I can do so just get on with it.

What I can say is, If you have any aspirations to go to university then seriously just work so hard.
I have the capacity to get AAA but I got BBC granted with resits I reckon I'll finish with ABB or AAB at a push.

Because trust me the amount of people that I thought would be fine have had to drop out after the first year cuz they failed. Sorry for the doom and gloom but you can't blag A-Levels.
I didnt revise for GCSE's and got 1 A* and 9 A's didn't revise for A - levels and get BBCCD (5 AS's, going to do 4 A2's).

So yeah all I can do is advise you to work really hard, this is if you want to go to uni.
 
A levels was the worst 8 months of my life, doing subjects i hated because only losers leave after GCSE. Or something.

I left half way through the AS levels, took the rest of the year out, then started college in September. What followed was the best two years of my life.

Don't mess about doing stuff because its expected of you. It doesn't matter what other people think. Soon, you'll be working 40 hours a week so that you can move out of your parents house by the time you're 28, so enjoy yourself now by doing courses you love learning things that interest and entertain you.

And as an aside, Photography is an excellent subject once you've settled and skipped past all the faux-psychology and worship of other people's self expression. It's nice to complement your stressful theory based subjects with an hour or so a day where you get to be creative and relax a bit... especially coming up to exam time and later in your second year when things start to get heavy.
 
Lightnix said:
I've signed up to do physics at my college for two years now, and they keep dropping the ****ing subject because they can't convince enough people to do it. Rage. :(

Edit: Speaking of which, before attending a new college, talk to current A2 students and make sure their timetabling is relatively sound. It's unbelievably stressful when your college introduces clashes between two subjects you've been studying for a year.
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A college should plan the A2 timetables around the options that students have selected. That's how I develop the A Levels timetables at the college I work at. The AS blocks are then planned around where A2 subjects are to ensure staff availability.
 
w11tho said:
It's great to see so many of you guys doing physics. Out of curiosity - would you not prefer to be given a rigorous introduction to the basics, rather than a watered down version of the fancy advanced stuff? I.e. would you not prefer to be able to calculate the time it would take for a ball to roll down a hill or model the elliptic orbits of the planets; rather than being able to reel off the different flavours of quark or to quote E=mc^2?
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I quite like the system at the moment, we cover the stuff in quite a lot of detail- so we get told about stuff thats surplus to the specification- which I quite enjoy.

If we spent too much time on a topic it would get repetitive.
 
Infam0us said:
What do you find challenging about it? I've just graduated with a degree in Sociology and Criminology, did a few Psychology modules aswell. Be interesting to see what you think about the course.
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It's not really challenging as such, just a lot of things I never thought of before that seem obvious to me now! No doubt it will get harder, but today was the first class on Psychology, the last week as been just Sociology.

I'm hoping to go to Uni and do Criminology though. Is it any good? Always liked the idea of it!
 
Like anant_shah94, I've also taken maths, further maths and all 3 sciences. It's certainly much more interesting than GCSE, and I've found myself *wanting* to study because I enjoy all my subjects, as opposed to being glad to get home at the end of the day like before. It's annoying only getting 5 study periods a fortnight and none free, but it's no different to school, I just have different modules of each subject with more lessons of that subject instead of having to do RE or something.

The step up for the sciences is certainly something, we've already learnt a fair amount in just a few lessons, but so far the maths is merely reiterating what we already know. Further maths consists of simple algorithms, which are kind of boring, but I understand it gets a lot harder and so I suppose we have to start somewhere, especially as it's a different branch of maths we haven't done before. I'd say physics is by far the most difficult subject at the moment, I'm one of few in our class that are keeping up at the moment and that's only due to what I know already, which isn't much past what we're at right now. Still very interesting though.
 
College was awesome. Was great to meet tons of new people, plus our college was a few minutes walk from the city centre so there was always stuff to do
 
When I was at college the worst part was the fact that I was forced to do group work with the kind of people who all think they are 'randomly funny' and alternative. I could not stand these people so was reluctant to talk to them unless needed, but still put 110% effort into my work. (you tend to find these people in either performing arts or media studies which I did)

However, the tutors absolutley bummed these kinds of people and noticing my reluctance to interact with such people criticised me for it and then claimed I contributed little to nothing to group projects, despite the fact that I think I contributed far more than all of them.

The final straw came when I made a student film. We got the oppurtunity to make anything we wanted using what we had learned. I felt I could produce a far better film on my own than being lumbered with any of the people in my group as I already had extensive knowledge of editing and their previous ideas in projects were poor. So in a group consisting of myself and myself only, I had to be camera man, foley man, director etc. and so thought of a topic that might be feasable to shoot/record/direct along with help from as few people as possible.

There had just been another shooting in a school in the US and seeing as these shootings usually revolve around 1 kid going through a hard time, and we were situated in a college (where these things happen) I thought it would be a good subject and easy enough to shoot as I only needed 1 main, and several occasional and intermittent characters, so I set about shooting this after I had scripted and written it with the help of a friend who was taking drama, a couple other people who I was able to get ahold of for a scene or two and then lots of strangers who didn't mind being in certain shots for me to get what I needed.

After I had done it all and presented it to the tutor (having previously presented my idea and plans several times before), I got called into the head of medias office for a 'discussion' with the tutor and head of media. At this point the media tutor had given me no end of problems for no reason other than what I can see as a sheer disliking.

Once this discussion had begun it became quite clear that the tutor had taken my idea and script to the head of media and informed him that he thought I was a danger and the script might be about myself. They then asked me to reassure them I wasn't going to come in and act out my script as in years previous they had a student go missing with his fathers shotgun and were worried the same thing would happen with me, and then informed me that despite all the effort and 10x amount of work I had put in to creating my film as much as anyone else in the class (they all only really did the minimum required for projects which is why I didn't want to work with them in the first place), my film would not be shown whilst everyone elses would as it could be seen as 'threatening'.


Needless to say I left the course after that, despite the subject being of high interest and enjoyment to me. Looking back I should have taken everything they said to me in that meeting and made a huge formal complaint, but at the time I was fuming and so sick of the way I had been treated I just wanted to leave and didn't really realise how out of line they had been.

That's my experience of college anyway. Tutors with genitals on their heads and students who think they are alternatively funny and cool. That was 4 years ago now.


/turns out that was quite a rant. End.
 
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I tried to make a short film, showing this pupils experiences and emotions in the build up over several days. You never actually saw any weapons or shooting or anything, just the build up before an incident is suggested to occur.
 
Oh.

Well, do you see why it might be a grey area? It's not something i'd have attempted in media. At best its somewhat macabre.

Edit: Sounds more arrogant than I intended. I mean it's a brave project that people are sure to misunderstand, so you have to be kinda ready to expect that sort of reaction and argue your point rationally, rather than quitting.
 
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I did argue the point rationally, or at least attempted to - and I expect had it simply been a case of explaining to the head of media my intentions then it would have been fine. However, I'd had so many problems with this tutor and he had fed so much bs about me to this guy that I really didn't have a chance arguing against what he'd said. The thing that really made me leave though was the fact that I had worked so hard on a project and he had basically decided it wasn't worthy of being presented to the media groups, whilst everyone elses would be, and anything from then on would be an uphill struggle grades wise.

Although, I recall now that there was one more smaller project after this, in which I worked within one of the groups and we finished in about a quarter of the alloted time because the whole group wanted to do the absolute minimum. Despite trying to convince them to put in a little more work and giving a lot of input into what we had already done, the tutors final evaluation was that I hadn't contributed very much at all.

So really, taking all that into account I decided there was little point in continuing with the course as I was always going to have this guy being overly critical and deciding I was less worthy of grades I felt I should have achieved.

Thats another reason why I dislike the group work. It's easy for your group to bring your work down, or for the tutor to misinterperet how much input you've actually had. Where as on solo projects, there's no question over how much input you've had, because it's all your work.
 
Nymins said:
It's not really challenging as such, just a lot of things I never thought of before that seem obvious to me now! No doubt it will get harder, but today was the first class on Psychology, the last week as been just Sociology.

I'm hoping to go to Uni and do Criminology though. Is it any good? Always liked the idea of it!
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Yeah, some of the theories you learn about in the subject really make you see the world from a different perspective. Its one of the reasons I'm carrying on to do a Masters as there's always more to learn. The jump in difficulty for you I believe will come when you start A2, but stick with it and don't let people tell you its an easy doss subject!

The one thing I didn't like about Psychology at College was that they only seemed focused on remembering case studies and those wrote about them. Whereas Sociology has a bit more freedom of expression in it with a number of different ideas explaining one outcome.

If you want to go to University and do Criminology I recommend you get very good at Sociology, as Criminology is basically the sociology of crime. But the topic is that vast and important it has its own discipline.

The short answer to your question is, yes its awesome if you enjoy it :D
 
I loved doing A levels (Maths, Physics, Chemistry and German). It was great being able to ditch all the useless crap that you had to do at GCSE, and I studied with loads of great people.

The things I didn't like were:
  • my school didn't offer further maths,
  • the 6th form was attached to a school so there were still loads of chavs, sponges and bottom feeders cluttering the place up,
  • the physics course (OCR b) was a pile of BS.

Enjoy your time though, if you end up on a decent university course, you'll find yourself with far less free time.:)
 
This thread makes me feel old. I finished college and went to university 10 years ago. Yipes.

Enjoy it while you can. PLEASE, make the most of it.
 
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