Study in UK!

I have posted before in my blog about the situation after I graduated from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore.

Well for a quick update, I am now in University of Sussex doing Masters in Embedded Systems.

Purpose of this blog
This blog will again be very long, I should have written that long before for the information who are younger than me or looking forward for foreign education but you can say I am a bit lazy in that. However, I will try to give a brief account of education system over here in UK.

As the first, I will try to tell you about the study system for the postgrad stuents overhere in UK. Later on I will tell you obviously why I choosed to study over here. I will try to remain honest as much as possible unlike others because I know it is a matter of the future who is reading this blog!

Study system of UK
As a Pakistani student, without any offence to any british, I would say its pathetic! I dont know what they are up to. But the reality is either they think that rest of the world is still living in the dark or whatsoever, or they are just after money.

The curriculum I studied in a B-grade institute of Pakistan i.e CIIT was more updated at the undergrad level what I am studying here in MSc. We had studied almost 98% of course contents back there in Pakistan in our undergrads and someone told me while in Pakistan, that for us south asians its very easy to score a distinction in UK. They have four levels of grades in Masters in here, i.e Fail, Pass, Pass with Merit and Pass with Disctinction. Pass with distinction is at 70%. University of Sussex is amongst top 121 universities of the world, but the education level can be good at undergrad level but not postgrads. They took 11,500 pounds of money from us and teaching us same old basics.

The reason behind that is very obvious, they have given admission to all students whoever have applied to just to grab the money, as they accept by theirselves that International Students are the main source of funding for their universities and most of the International students come in at Postgrad level. There is not even a single british student in our MSc class of 50+. Most are Pakistani or Indians, some greeks and some are from Africa and Turkey etc. One of my MSc classfellow has medical background (he has done a CCNA course) to score admission in MSc in Communications with Business Management, another one did BCS(2 years) from Petroman Lahore, 7 years ago and he is in MSC in Space and Satellite Communications. You can see by yourself! He never studied Signals and Systems, how can he know about Z-transforms or the difference of Laplace and Time domains? He never studied Communication systems before, how he can suddenly take it all of MPSK and modulation techniques in general? But they have given admission to all of them. We studied about RAM and ROM in our 1st semester at CIIT, and in here, in 2nd term of MSc they are teaching the same basic things in the course Microprocessors and their interfacing, I just took the first class of that course and left going in the lecture, because now I am contended that I have given that much money for just a piece of paper which is recognized worldwide and nothing else. I cant go to a lecture where the teacher tells me that processor is of that shape and it sits in the CPU or what is L1 and L2 cache.

It some time seems that even they dont know by theirselves that what they should teach. They try to keep all the students together after giving them all the admission from different backgrounds and then all of the sudden they start talking about too heavy things, which one can't understand before understanding pre-requisite topics.

The situation is same all around UK, one of my friend was in University of Northampton, he has done BIT from CIIT and was in my parallel batch, after studying one term he has changed the course to some business one, as he just dont want to learn same old things of PHP and databases again and again, when their is no assignments, no projects altogether. In here at US, they do give assignments and projects but the level at which we studied in Pakistan, thats just kids work for a student who has done Bacheolers before in those subjects. There should be some advance courses, the courses which are more related. So, that one a can say that yes I have studied uptil the Masters Level.

My Opinion
In my opinion, the post graduate courses they are running all across UK are tailor-made to attract foreign students and to grab money from them and also to get more brains from all of those poor countries who in turn make some better change for their country.

Why I choosed UK?
I was trying to score good in GRE to go to USA. Why I choosed UK instead? The answer is not that much ambigues, every one who is here, is just of the same reason, there is a war going on our northern frontiers in which USA is a party. They could easily refuse my visa application or they could suspect me as a terrorist out of no reason while I am in USA trying to earn some bread and study at my own. Education is the biggest industry of UK and while they know University of Sussex is very credible (I dont know why) they given me easy visa in just 8 days and I was here while the classes of 2 weeks were already passed.

The conversion rate of GBP pound against Pak rupee is 122 rupee=1 pound. That was the main reason. In Pakistan you can earn money to live a life, but you cant spare anything until you do include some type of black business in it. The job market here is not that competetive if we see from the point of view of Programmers, there is a immense need of it. Taxes are high but the income is still very good if we convert and send money back home.

I came here to earn some good money and then get back to start some type of business as my own. If you want to earn and want a quick visa, UK is a good choice. But if you want to learn something, go in sweden or USA in first place. Don't come to UK for study, dont expect from them that they can teach you better then you already have studied in Pakistan, yet the choice is yours. My age was already 24 and the life is quick to pass-by, I couldnt afford to see somewhere else, If you are 22, 23 it will be a good idea to see somewhere around and if you are indeed a techie, east-asia is not a bad option altogether.