Bangor University Open Day
I am now back home from a short weekend away at Bangor in Wales to visit their university’s open day with my dad. This will be a recount of my overall experience and my opinions on both the town and the university itself.
First of all, I will begin with the town. I’m not going to lie- my first impression upon arriving was that it was a bit of a run-down ghost-town (good name for a poem?) since the buildings were more run down than the ones I’m used to seeing where I live and there was barely anyone walking around. The first place my dad and I walked to was the pier which was very pretty but we couldn’t go on it because it was fenced off. I’m sure it would look even better on a sunny day!
After that, we explored the city center and I was surprised to discover that it has all of the main high street shops such as Costa, WHSmith, H&M, Debenhams, PoundWorld etc that you’d expect any other city to have. For lunch, we went in one of the cafes and I had a cheddar cheese and onion panini, a ‘welsh oatie’ and two mugs of coffee. Before this, I had a migraine coming on so I think my coffee addiction has returned.
Once we had finished, it was time for us to check into our B&B since we were going to stay overnight. I had the bed right next to the window.
Anyway, enough about the town now. At 1pm, it was time to go to the university for the welcome meeting. Despite the fact that Bangor had seemed rather empty earlier on in the day, there were LOTS of people at the open day! The university itself has both old traditional buildings and also more modern hi-tech buildings which is nice. After the welcome meeting, we were separated off into groups based on which academic school we wanted to visit. I, of course, went to the psychology school/building. The student reps were very nice, although I didn’t really know what to say so I just asked about work experience opportunities and whether or not it would be useful to do any preparation outside of A-levels for the course. One of the reps took me to one of the lecturers and he said that there are opportunities for psychology related work experiences in and around Bangor and this is especially important if you want to do a DClinPsy after the degree, which is what I want to do. However, it is a very competitive post-graduate course to get onto, so its best to get as much related work experience as possible, sooner rather than later. After that, everyone went into one of the lecture theaters for a sample psychology lecture. This probably sounds really cheesy but during that lecture, I felt a warm tingling sensation flowing through me for the whole time. Wow… I actually feel love for my subject! 😛 Finally, we went on a mini tour of the campus and also a coach tour of the accommodation which looked nice and modern. Overall, I am very impressed with Bangor University and it has definitely lived up to my expectations. I am 99% sure that I will be applying to study there when it is time to apply in the autumn. I can actually imagine myself fitting in there too because it is very community based and the psychology department seems really nice and the staff are passionate about the subject. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any photos of inside the university because my mind was preoccupied with other things, but i’ll leave you with a couple of photos I took from the outside (plus some pictures I took whilst we were driving through Snowdonia on the way home!)
JourneyToClinicalPsychology 