A Guide to University: Step 4: University Characters

University is so fascinating because you meet so many different people there. First, there is the faculty. You come across professors, lecturers and assistants, young and old, male and female, pleasant and unpleasant. And each of them has a distinctive teaching style. There are professors who leave most of the talking in class to you because they either encourage lively discussions or set two to three students’ presentations per class. The first method allows you to participate more actively. This makes the lesson more interesting for you. But it gets difficult for the professor, if no one in class wants to contribute to the discussion. This leads to an awkward situation where you are sitting in class quietly waiting for the others to start talking. And if the professor doesn’t know how to get a discussion up and running, most of the lesson will pass in silence. Or it will again be the professor who does all the talking to break the silence. With the other method, having one presentation after another, you will in all likelihood get bored because you can only listen. You have to sit there passively for 90 minutes waiting for the time to pass. However, it is a successful way to avoid silence in class.

Another group of university professors works with texts which you have to read at home and then elaborate on in detail in class. You will probably like this method because you go through each text accurately. You discuss important aspects of each text together. And you can take supportive notes. This makes studying for the exam later much easier. Other professors make use of whole course books which include explanations or rules and various exercises. Unfortunately, sometimes professors have to use course books they themselves totally dislike, but still have to go through them. If they start making fun of the books and the people who wrote them, you might have some entertaining lessons.

On the one hand, some professors present their subject matters in a very creative way – like watching a TV series or a documentary in order to practice your listening skills. Other professors constantly use the same course notes and teaching methods. Sometimes their classes are less interesting because they simply read out their notes without integrating you.

It is an interesting phenomenon that in almost every university department you will find one professor who most of the students are afraid of. You are afraid simply because he or she is such an alarmingly formidable person. Or because he or she is infamous for holding especially difficult courses. But will you also discover the opposite – professors who are liked by most students? Surprisingly, you won’t find that very often. Owing to the fact that you might prefer a particular teaching style, you will have a different opinion about some professors than your fellow students.

It is not only fascinating to meet all those different types of professors, but also all different types of students. There is one group of students you will immediately identify with; namely those with characters that are most similar to yours. You will meet each other in the same courses and you will be similar types of students. This means that you will finish regular assignments equally early or equally late. And you will dislike similar classes and assignments. Then there is the kind of student who is the exact opposite of you. Let’s say you tend to start quite late with your assignments. Then this student will have already completed every written assignment when you are still looking for a suitable topic. In the opposite case, if you are always well prepared and study for hours and hours, you will meet students who complete their assignments at the very last minute and still make a good grade. Either way, this type of student will drive you crazy because he or she shows you how nerdy or lazy you could be in your studies.

You will see that comparing the various characters you meet at university, especially comparing them to you, is an interesting activity. You will come across new students even in your last term. Just as you think you already know pretty much all the students who started at the same time you did, you will meet still another new face. And that’s one of the reasons that make university and its characters so fascinating.