University Has Broken My Heart

I have dreamed of coming to university since I was a young girl.

From GCSEs to A-levels, you slowly begin weeding down your subject choices, narrowing them until you are left with the one subject in this world you want to dedicate the most time to studying. You strive to get good grades so you can progress to the next chapter of your education, with university being the ultimate goal — the place where you can finally thrive and enjoy your education because you are no longer forced to study subjects that don’t truly spark your interest.

But then you get to university, and the concept of teaching and education begins to crumble.

You now have lecturers who, although they know their subjects, are not necessarily skilled at teaching them. Every lecture, rather than being a rich learning experience, often feels like a one-hour seminar where you are guaranteed to gain perhaps twenty percent of the material, because the lecture atmosphere is no longer designed for intimate learning.

You sit in a huge room of up to three hundred students, behind a skinny lecture desk that can barely fit the length of your laptop. The lecturer taps through slides at light speed. Sometimes there isn’t even a whiteboard in sight for new information to be explained or explored in a way that engages your brain with these new concepts.

I am finally at the pinnacle of my education, and I am no longer being taught.

Instead, I am expected to teach myself every day. Pre-reading, recorded lectures, and hours of independent study are required because even the system seems to acknowledge that it is impossible to grasp these difficult concepts within a single one-hour lecture.

All of my time is now expected to be spent not delving deeper into my subject or exploring it with curiosity, but instead teaching myself the concepts from scratch.

All of my energy is exhausted. My passion is lost in the stress.

The bright and starry-eyed girl who once dreamed of understanding the human body now dreads the mention of yet another disease I have to self teach — one out of ten that my lecturer expects me to understand within the span of an hour.

I don’t know my lecturers by name, and they do not know me.

University has broken my heart.

My expectations have been wholly let down. I have reached the pinnacle of education that I dreamed about my whole life, and yet I feel as though I have been left in a desert, fending for myself and doing this journey almost alone.

I want to have teachers again.

Teachers who truly want to make sure they are teaching you to the best of their abilities — not tapping through forty slides in an hour simply to introduce you to a concept.

I was a girl who loved revision and loved learning. Sitting down to study used to feel exciting. Now, even picking up my things to learn can feel like one of the most difficult things to do, because I have been tasked with such a difficult role: being both the teacher and the student.

I understand that this is how university education has been structured for years, but that does not make it right.

Such high expectations every day — even every week — are draining for one human being when they are learning concepts that are already so complex and demanding.

And I cannot help but believe that more intimate teaching environments would do nothing but produce better students — students who truly know and love their subjects.

Those students would become better future leaders, better thinkers, and better contributors to society. When people genuinely understand and care about what they study, they push their fields forward.

Society itself would be better for it. We would propel ourselves even further.

Instead, I feel as though I have reached the very place I spent years striving to reach, only to discover that the education I imagined waiting for me does not truly exist.

University was supposed to be the place where my love of learning deepened.

But somehow, along the way,

it broke my heart.