Hello and welcome to this video. My name is Jubair and I'm a PhD student here at UCL and in my spare
time I make YouTube videos. So my PhD is in the department of mechanical engineering, here at UCL,
and it's to do with producing nanofibers to be used as wound healing bandages that
are both antimicrobial but also improve the quality of healing. So before I did my PhD
I did my master's also at UCL in biomaterials and tissue engineering,
and even before that I did my undergraduate just across the road in biochemistry,
so I would say I'm quite qualified to be talking about today's topic which is
a comparison between undergraduate life and postgraduate life here in the UK, and in
particularly London. So now I'm going to transform into another room but I hope you enjoy the video.
So the first main difference is experience. Most commonly in the UK you have just finished college,
you're at the age of 18 or 19, and you really don't know what the world has to
offer and you really don't know what you want to do in terms of career -
at least that's how it was for me. At that age especially in the UK,
you are always encouraged to get a degree - a degree will be good for you,
a degree will get you a job and it's very difficult to know what you actually want.
Shall I go for computer science? Should I go for engineering? Sometimes it's just too difficult
to decide. So sometimes, often we just choose degrees that look good or degrees that promise
us a good career. This can often be a good thing but sometimes it just makes us a little confused
and before we start a degree, college is nothing like university. University
feels like a giant step from college and we're just thrown into the deep end essentially
postgraduate life is different, I mean you've survived three or four years of undergraduate
life you know how the graduate life is and you made that choice only because you wanted to,
because you wanted to pursue that career, because you wanted to get that job that required a
master's or you know that you want to do a PhD. So therefore the difference between an undergraduate
and a postgraduate is as a postgraduate you know what you're in for or at least you think you do,
because there are some more differences between undergrad life and postgrad life.
So that leads me on to the second difference between undergrad life and postgraduate life,
which is the teaching style. So as an undergraduate you are most used to colleges and
secondary schools where the teacher would write something on the board and you have a syllabus and
something to follow for your exams. Undergraduate life is kind of similar like that there is
some syllabus, there is something to follow because you are going to be examined at the
end of the year. And the teaching style is kind of similar to college, but it's a step higher. As in,
there is a bit more autonomy, there is a bit more expected from you, not everything will be taught
in the lectures and that's something that I found very weird/unfriendly when I started undergrad
is that not all the material is going to be on the lecture slides. That is actually a good thing
because teachers are making sure that you spend some time on your own to go over the content
and just by looking at the lecture slides does not mean you're going to get to first - so make
sure you actually go through all the lectures and do the all the extra work that you can do.
So postgraduate life takes that up a higher notch, in fact, the lessons are more unstructured
or at least that's how it seems because there is no definite syllabus. You are examined in the same
way or similar way as an undergraduate and most of the lectures are given by professionals people
in industry, people already professors, people high up in academia and they're just lecturing
or they are actually just talking about the area of expertise. And you might be thinking why am I
forced to be in all these lectures where just people are just talking about their companies,
people are talking about ribosomes or anything maths or science related and it has nothing to
do with what was written on my course, and that's because as a postgraduate the expectation for you
to teach yourself or expectation for you to read around the content, find your own things is just
so much different. So actually exam questions are marked completely different. Most of the times
they're even marked by the same lecturers that give you the lectures from different disciplines,
from different industries and they want to know that you can think outside the box, that you have
the critical skills, the analytical skills to actually look at the exam question and from all
the knowledge that you've gained as a postgraduate put that onto paper. So I did my postgraduate as
a master's in masters in science, an MSc and also my bachelor's as a BSc, however, these tips will
apply to you even if you're doing a masters or a bachelor's that are not necessarily an MSc or BSc.
Maybe not everything will apply but at least most of them will apply. So the third big difference
between an undergrad and a postgrad degree is the course layout. So of course an undergrad degree
in the UK at least is three to four years so that's three to four years for one course
this is intended on purpose to split a course into three years to allow the person, the student to
actually mature and grow through the years because like I said before, in the UK you are just 18 or
19 years old when you leave college and you are put into the deep end with university. However,
university as an undergrad is structured in such a way that it actually encourages you to actually go
out, socialise, it gives you some free time and it gives you three to four years. Usually the first
year doesn't add up towards the final grade or some universities it might only be five percent
so that kind of gives you the encouragement that the little boost is go out socialise
and like most people say there is nothing like your undergrad years you should enjoy them and
if you don't enjoy them you really do miss out because you can never really replicate that even
as a postgraduate. So basically as a post graduate you only have one year and the MSc course that I
did, six months is dedicated to teaching and six months is dedicated to projects, so you only have
six months really to learn the content and that layout is just so so different six months of
intense studying and then six months of project. It doesn't necessarily give you the free time or
encourage you to actually do extracurricular activities, it doesn't encourage you to do
traveling and stuff like that. In fact some supervisors will be like no no no traveling, so
that's a big difference between the course layout of an undergraduate degree and a postgraduate
degree. So the fourth difference between an undergraduate degree and a postgraduate degree is
a difference in expectations from the lecturers and the markers. So basically speaking as a
postgraduate you are expected to do a lot more, you are expected to go through the course content
and make your own notes, your own knowledge, gain your own sources, you are expected to have
more detailed answers during your examinations, you are expected to behave better as well. So
there is a big difference between an undergraduate student and a postgraduate student and as someone
that teaches both undergraduates and postgraduates I can strongly confirm that there is a difference
between undergraduate students and postgraduate students in their keenness to learn and that's not
a bad thing, because honestly as an undergraduate student you're very young even if you're coming
back to university and you're like a lot older than the other students. It's just
that level of maturity, is just different and not necessarily a bad thing but the position that
you are in life could be different so that's the small difference between an undergraduate student
and a postgraduate student. So the final difference between undergrad life and postgrad
life is project life. So both undergraduate students and postgraduate students have projects,
so for an undergrad student it might be the last few months of their final year and for a master's
student it's usually the last six months or half their course. But there is a big big difference
between this, so as a project supervisor to both undergraduate students and postgraduate students I
routinely see the difference so as an undergrad student you are expected to do less work in
terms of laboratory. This is because you are supervised different, you have different levels
of responsibility, so you are also expected to have a smaller thesis, less explanation and
generally you have actually less time to do it. That is because, as an undergrad student once
you're doing your project you're inundated or overwhelmed by other modules that are actually
running concurrently so you actually are strapped for time, however, master students have dedicated
project time. So six months for me was dedicated to projects so you are expected a
whole heap more, for example you're expected to be in lab every single day because you shouldn't
have other commitments, you are expected to have a thicker thesis with more detailed description more
analysis. And generally in labs, as a postgraduate student, you are trusted a little bit more just
because there are fewer of you and by that time you already have an undergraduate degree
so you have some sort of credibility in terms of being in labs and generally the difference
is there is a bit more expectation just like my previous point between an undergraduate student
and a postgraduate student. So those are my five key points for the differences between being an
undergraduate student and a postgraduate student. I hope you enjoyed this video, if you do enjoy
this video, press a like wherever you're watching and make sure you subscribe to whatever channel
you see this on. I have been Jubair, a PhD student at UCL and thank you for watching this video.