Adam Griffiths

Done and dusted: fairwell college, I shall not miss thee.

I have now completely finished my college course and am over the moon to have received a full DDD (Distinction x3) - the top grade possible and equivalent to 3 A level's at A grade. That means I am definitely off to Cardiff in September; but that's for another blog post.

I have written about my feelings of college previously, but this time around I want to talk about some of the subjects covered on the course, and the course in general. When I went to the college for my interview I was told there would be lots of practical IT work, we'd be taking computers apart, rebuilding them and all sorts. I was also told the course was focussed on mainly the IT systems we don't see such as the computers in cars, or microchips in alarm clocks. Nothing like 'hidden' computers was ever mentioned during the course, and one of the most interesting things about the course turned out to be a blatant lie.

The Course Contents

The official title of my BTEC course is BTEC National Diploma for IT Practitioners (IT Support). I didn't know how much this course was dedicated to IT support until I got to the second year and found out we had three modules that were pretty much the same: IT Technical Support; Maintaining Computer Systems; and IT Troubleshooting and Repair. These modules were not only similar, but were immensely dull and involved little practical (we had two practical lessons for one of the modules, that was all).

I also found that the lecturing staff wasn't overly capable. In the first year we had many lectures, some were interesting, others weren't. But int he second year we had zero lectures; all we had was assignments and were told to go off and do them. Of course, we could have been subject to the staff trying to get us to work on our own ready for University or similar. But no, I don't think we were. I simply think we were the subject of lazy staff.

College's Organisational Skills

Before I go ahead with this section of the post, I would just like to say that when somebody mentions the college and something they're organising, I think of two words: pissup, and brewery. Everything the college has tried to orchestrate has always amassed in one gigantic pool of fail. In the first year we ended up having five different lecturers for our Advanced Databases module. In the end they settled for a vicar with no databases experience whatsoever; whom subsequently lost all of our first assignments. What a start.

We also 'had' to pay £40 into a trip fund to put towards organised trips etc. Nobody had a problem with this. Until of course, the college dropped the bombshell that they weren't prepared to organise trips for us, and we had to do it ourselves. We split into groups and organised a few trips, all of which cost just a few pounds each. I decided to organise a paintballing trip and ended up taking 40+ IT students paintballing for the day with five lecturers. What a day, possibly the best day of college.

My Advice

If you are local to Shrewsbury and are thinking of going to do the same course as I did, don't. I hated every second of my college life; I was sold the course with promises of practicals and ended up having five practical lessons throughout the whole two year period. Unless you are absolutely in love with IT support and you know that's the career for you, then go for it. If, on the other hand, you are not like that and just want to do some IT, then I feel a job will probably suit you more.

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My book is available from Packt Publishing.