Glamorgan University > Reviews (11)

I have been studying at Glamorgan University for 2 years now and I can truthfully say that it is one of the best in wales. It is situated just off the A470 at the Pontpridd turnoff opposite Pontypridd college, which is a 20 minute drive from Cardiff.

At first I didn't know what to expect, but I was pleased with the outcome. I quickly made friends and settled in nicely and I have no regrets about choosing Glamorgan.

The facilities for students are excellent, with 1000's of computers a huge library, cash point machines, travel shop and newsagents, 2 bars, a restuarant, 3 snackbars, a club and a large sporting complex, which includes a fitness room, sports hall for football, basketball, hockey and netball and a pool table with big screen sky tv. If your living in the halls of residence, then it is no more than a few minutes walk to your place of study. There are about 15 blocks on campus separated by different subjects, so you can just imagine the chioce of courses which are available. I'm already looking forward to my final year after my year out.

Parking in the university is easy, as there is a huge car park accross the road from the university at the cost of 50p. This usually includes a "get me home policy" whereby if you were to leave your car lights on and run down the battery for example, then security would come down and sort it out for you, to make sure you are not stuck.
The only problem is that if you have a lecture in a building at the top of the university, then it's a long tiring uphill walk.

As I am doing a computing course i thought it would be appropriate to give my attention and views to how the university can help me get through my particular course and what facilities they have for computing students.

For a start, it is easy to book a room with projectors in them for practicing presentations, which is quite useful (and free).

J block is the main computing block which has 4 floors, the first 3 of which contain computer labs with open access for students. The bottom floor is normally open 24 hours and contains basic PCs with 15" monitors, which are mainly used for typing up assignments and browsing the web. The first floor is a slight improvement of the ground floor, with better spec PCs and bigger monitors with more software on them. Some of these rooms also contain CD writers. The second floor is the best and main computing labs as they cater for all computing needs. All labs have 4x CD writers with 17" monitors. Some labs have scanners in them for students who require this facility and there are also network labs with 15" LCD flat screen monitors in them with Intel infra red mice. For multimedia students there are numerous labs with excellent sound systems and video recorders in them.

As the university is connected via a LAN (T1), the Internet is fast and download speeds can reach anything upto 300k/s off other T1 LANs or higher.

For saving all your documents, each computing student is given thier own space on the network with an allocation of 650mb (big enough to backup on cd).

Only I would reccommend a regular backup, as admin have been known to delete people's drive space with little warnings during holiday periods.

You can imagine that these labs are allways full though, so to use them, you will need to be in early and make sure there aren't any tutorials booked in the labs, as you usually get kicked out.

The only draw back is when it comes to printing, as it cost 5p per sheet (10p for colour), which can be quite expensive when you have a huge assignment to print off. It is also anoying when the PCs with defaults set to 'letter' when you print, come out blank, for which you are still charged for. The university refuses to refund this cost too!

Us students are poor you know, we could do without this!