The University of Pinterest

When I make my comparison, I don’t aim to paint a picture of middle-aged mothers named Sharon running rampant across the UoM campus, nor do I try to claim that the students of this university are actively seeking the latest “healthy vegan low-carb paleo gluten-free juice detox” – actually, witnessing the insane amounts of chicken nuggets ingested and the liters of Poundland (a shop where all items cost £1) wine consumed by my friends, I’d argue the opposite. Instead, when I make my comparison, I aim to pinpoint a certain aura of doing things around here: the aura of do-it-yourself.

The idea of do-it-yourself (or, as experienced Pinteresters say, DIY) projects is a particularly frequent occurrence on the aforementioned social site and sometimes even more so here, especially within the engineering departments. The examples of this DIY culture are vast:

Learning Matlab programming? You will be taught through “tutorials” during which you complete a worksheet with a number of small tasks that help you understand programming step-by-step = DIY!

Have a “Design 1” module? Covering only the absolute essentials of background theory, you are “thrown into the deep end” and made to learn by trial & error, working on a group design project from start to finish = that’s DIY!

Have a faulty fridge that turns any piece of dairy into fro-yo and makes orange icicles out of carrots? No worries, residential support services absolutely suck and don’t fix it even if you call 9 TIMES! = you have to DIY!

Instantly, I can hear your shocked gasps and feel the piercing frowned looks; even in the words of my very own mother: “..and that costs £9000 a year?”. But paradoxically, I have found this hands-on approach not only refreshingly novel but actually much more successful at achieving the ultimate goal of university education: to prime individuals for their future careers with relevant SKILLS. And I don’t need to be a recruitment manager to understand that only very few things serve as real proof of one’s skills like an actual (even semi-filled) portfolio of actual projects he has undertaken. Definitely better proof than one’s knowledge of information from a 15-year old textbook that was learned in the typical “cram-exam-forget” manner; something that in today’s world of democratized knowledge can be “Google’d” (shame on you if you use Bing!) within a few keyboard strokes anyway.

So as I look back over the first semester I have spent at university – with all its chaos (see my first blog to know what I’m talking about