hello how are you it's Simranjeet Kaur Mann here and i make content for aspiring solicitors i make
content about careers i vlog my life as a trainee solicitor and show my journey towards becoming a
qualified solicitor in the uk and today's video may be controversial i don't know maybe it is i
don't know i'm just gonna be very very honest about the things that i didn't like at the
university of bristol i studied law there and i guess maybe a bit of a disclaimer is i studied
at the university of bristol from 2015 down to 2018 so of course my opinion of the university
is three years old things may have changed since then if they have let me know if you are a recent
graduate at bristol i'd love to hear your thoughts about your uni the university and even though in
this video i'm going to be talking about the things that i specifically hated at university
i would never ever go back in time and change my decision about studying at bristol i honestly
really loved it there however in this video i'm going to be talking about four things that i felt
really maybe let down the experience just a little bit just a quick ad break before we start the
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so the first thing that i didn't really like about law school at bristol was the elitism there was
oh god where can i start with this so obviously at university i think there are certain universities
out there where you can really i guess tell the difference that people have in their upbringing
and their background and this is not me saying if you've had a good upbringing and you've come from
a privileged background that you're automatically a rude person or you're automatically entitled
it's not that at all it was just a few experiences here and there and i'm talking very very rare
experiences so one of these experiences was i was walking out of a lecture i think this was
actually my second week of my first year so very very new to the university and i overheard two
people in front of me saying i can't believe our lecturer doesn't even pronounce her tease
how can she even you know teach i'm not even going to go to her lectures i don't think she's
a good teacher i don't know and this lecture was actually really good so i think that comment was
just uncalled for if i'm honest with you and i think that was just one thing that made me
feel like wow do i even belong here basically the second time where i felt like there was
a massive i guess divide in people's upbringings and opinions to the point where it clashed was
i'm not sure whether i'm going to remember these facts properly but the world's memorial building
at bristol is our law building and it's absolutely beautiful absolutely stunning building but i think
it's named after a slave trader and there were a lot of i guess protests and stuff happening
about that and that was the one time at university where i felt like there was such a clear divide
we've heard about in recent news stories about that statue falling down in bristol so when i
heard about that it was very much a moment of wow this is something that even when i was at
university we were protesting about statues and these kind of monuments being named after people
who did the most horrible things so it's that was something that i think really stuck with my
university experience and i think at school i guess i had a bit of a naive view of all of us
being the same and coming from the same upbringing but when i was at university it really brought to
light in a very harsh reality of how how different my upbringing was to other people and then this
then contributed sometimes to my feeling of not belonging at university i was very intimidated
of people essentially who i felt like had a high upbringing and that essentially made me feel like
i couldn't be part of the corporate sphere i couldn't work well in the professional field
because i was not made for this i did not have that upbringing to survive in that kind of culture
and i'm really glad that i got myself out of that mindset because right now i'm in the corporate
world and i think i'm doing pretty well for myself so i'm glad i got out of that and didn't really
think that you have to be of a certain background in order to get this kind of career i also think
that the teaching at bristol some of my tutors were absolutely fantastic i mean they were so
inspiring but some of them the way they taught was so boring and uninspiring and i mean talking about
literally reading off a lecture slide and i mean this is probably the case at any university not
only bristol but i've i just found that really uninspiring and it was a bit like
why can't you guys i engage your audience a little bit i don't know so
that's one thing that i i didn't really like at law school either i also felt like sometimes your
creativity and law gets dimmed because you have to go by these set modules i think my biggest
thing with law school was how impractical some of the modules were and i i really didn't understand
why i had to learn some of these things which i'm not going to use like that whole argument that you
hear about all the time of when am i going to use pythagoras theorem in my life that's how i felt
about some of my modules however one really good thing that bristol did was introduce modules in
my final year that were a lot more practical so i did modules um like one module was me
basically working in a pro bono clinic and then doing coursework about my experience there
that was really practical because i had real life experience with real clients and helping them out
with their their legal issues and the second thing was a module called corporate law simulation at
university and that was essentially you would act like the buyers and sellers on each side of
a transaction and every week or every seminar you would learn about a new process in the m a process
but you would actually be acting like you're in it it was those kind of modules actually that brought
me back into being interested in law whereas i felt like the really theoretical ones they just
pushed me further away but that's just my opinion some people really enjoyed those theoretical
modules i personally just really wanted to learn in a more practical manner which is why i really
enjoyed the lpc because it was just so much more practical and more applicable to the life of a
solicitor and the last thing i'd like to say about what i didn't like about studying law at
the university of bristol and to be fair this is probably something that again could be said for
a lot of law schools around the uk is that there is such a push on you studying law at university
trying to gain a training contract or a vacation scheme in commercial law and then qualifying
as a solicitor and then you go up the ranks so associate managing associate partner and i don't
think there is enough discussion on the different routes that there are available to you i think
there are so many resources and things available to those of you who want to become commercial
law solicitors which is great and that should be encouraged but i sometimes felt like at university
if you wanted to for example become a barrister or you wanted to go into family law or if you wanted
to example try something completely new outside of law that was not really encouraged as such and i
think law is such a versatile degree you don't only need to become a solicitor after studying
law you could go into a whole range of other fields and i wish that was encouraged more at
university rather than just placing this emphasis on this rigid structure and also there was nothing
at university that i encountered that offered in-house opportunities it was always in private
practice firms and it felt like private practice was the only way to qualify as a solicitor
i only realized afterwards that you can paralegal in in-house firms in their legal teams you can
get a training contract in in-house legal teams and you can qualify and become a solicitor and
in-house legal teams as well so i didn't know any of that when i was at university and i wish there
was more emphasis on that as well rather than just going down the typical route that everyone
including myself ended up going down so that's everything that i'd like to say about my time
i hope that video was somewhat helpful hopefully it wasn't too negative at the end of the day those
were only four things that i didn't really kind of like about law school in terms of studying
law i'm not sure whether i'll do it whether i'd do it again if i'm honest with you if i could go
back in time maybe i would have studied english or history but then the GDL might have been super
intense so i don't know at the end of the day i'm just happy with the routes that i've taken in my
career journey and where i studied but these are just four little things to just have an honest
chat with you about things that i encountered at university i will let you all go now
thank you so much for watching and i will see you all in the next video