Very disappointing experience overall. I came to E...

Very disappointing experience overall. I came to Edinburgh Napier due to its reputation as being one of the top places in the UK for Media Studies, a reputation that is indeed very well deserved.

Unfortunately while the facilities are indeed impressive and the course is very well structured, the one thing that really lets this institutes reputation down is poor lecturing and upsettingly enough, student bullying.

From an outside perspective, Edinburgh Napier over the years has garnered a reputation for being very biased towards people from the East coast and many students from colleges in the surrounding area are automatically reserved a place when gravitating from college and into university. This in turn makes it very difficult for aspiring students on the West Coast to gain a place on the course. I have friends who have been knocked back from this institute for little to no reason at all, and when I managed to get a conditional offer, at the beginning of the course, there was a certain degree of prejudice I encountered.

One of my head lecturers, appeared to take a real dislike to me as a student and this appeared to be down to which institution I had came from and where I had studied. I constantly heard passive aggressive remarks from other students, and every assessment it appeared that all my ideas where just totally shut down on the spot, which in turn really hurt my confidence and self esteem and it caused me to sink into a massive depression after only five weeks of being on the course. In addition a week before my college graduation, my scriptwriting lecturer attempted to guilt trip me into missing my graduation.

While I do believe this was all wrong on so many levels and a complete abuse of power on my universities behalf, this is really more to do with the lecturers who who were in charge of the programme. My two programme leaders appeared to be very arrogant and very egotistical towards my class itself. The General Programme Leader was never around during the course and he was always making trips abroad to Singapore, in addition to this, during camera workshops we were constantly left with a camera technician who didn't really seem to know what he was doing and appeared very flustered and uptight at being left in charge of the workshop, while our programme leader, essentially abandoned him to take charge of an entire class full of students.

Furthermore, the other programme leader was very condescending towards everybody in the class, and appeared to speak down to the students. I had a Dutch classmate, and the lecturer in question was always stopping during lecturers to ask "are you getting any of this?" and in the second semester, they appeared to do the same thing with an American student, on the course. I had very similar kind of reception from this same lecturer. Every conversation and assignment I had to give always unintentionally erupted into an argument, I was given constructive feedback such as "your ideas are offensive, unethical and really nerdy." In addition, every idea I came up with and effort I made to actually do well, was shut down on the spot with no attempt to even help me be productive, essentially I was told "we don't care how you do it, just make it work!" and I kept hearing from this lecturer "this isn't about what you are going to find interesting, this is about what we find academically viable." I ended up sinking into a massive depression throughout the first semester and I came into the second semester very bitter and upset and I was just counting down the weeks for when I could actually leave the course.

I do believe Edinburgh Napier University is indeed a very good institution, but this department bullying, really drags this institution down as a whole. I was recently diagnosed with PTSD and I have suffered from chronic anxiety in the five years since.

I left after only one year because I just couldn't carry on and staying for two years and getting a BA(Hons) just didn't seem worth it.