Found myself on the Stoke campus of Staffs Uni yesterday. As someone who graduated back when the Stafford campus existed I’m of two minds.
The facilities available are fantastic. So much more than we had available to us. VR Labs, green screen rooms, 3D printers, scanners, laser cutters, all sorts of fun toys that I’d have loved when I was studying.
But it just feels a little... off. A lot of the feel that Stafford campus has seems to have gone, it feels quite cramped and like management just had to ram everything in where they can. Not to detract from the efforts of departments and lecturers of course, they’ve done a fantastic job.
It’s a real shame to be honest. There was nothing wrong with the Stafford campus, but they closed it anyway, forced a load of staff to commute or move to Stoke, and ruined the feeling that Stafford campus had - you knew everyone, everyone was like-minded STEM folk and it didn’t feel like a bunch of tower blocks smacked together. Plus the benefits of not being in Stoke... in Stafford it wasn’t terribly unusual to see a laptop in bits on a table in a public space (that... may have been me) and you could leave things unattended without much worry at all.
Sounds like their intake year on year is getting bigger and bigger too. At some point they’ll run out of buildings to buy presumably (or carparks to build on...)
(For the record I’ve never heard a bad word about the lecturers, everything that’s wrong is purely down to those at the top of the food chain)
)