Re: I am here to help. What can I do for you today?
Or on a completely different subject, offspring has been filling in UCAS forms (university applications for those not familiar with the term). Back in the day, a university prospectus was a glossy, possibly colourful book with a welcome from the head honcho on page five, three or four pages describing the location, the laundrette in the student union and the seedy nightclub in the town which has the cheap beer, and then section after section from each individual university department listing all the courses they run - maybe one page per course - what the requirements are for entry, what sort of careers you could go on to and maybe some testimony from a current student or "industry" about how good the thing is, topped off with the occasional "former student, 'Z', went to work for the Jensen car company and now owns his own engine-tuning business supplying power to half the teams in National Karting".
I was surprised to find you can still get paper propspectuses posted to you, but their content is the same as the woeful online version (other than a lack of drone video and scrollable 360 degree views). Plenty of gloss and colour, testimonials, photographs of the student accommodation, sports facilities, the thirty three onsite cafes, restaurants, bars, swimming pools, gyms and burger vans, the vibrant city nightlife and lots of stock photos of models posing as happy, smiling students (there's no way those people are actual students) relaxing in the summer sun on a grassy bank outside the new Arts block with 1,000 seat theatre and subsidised performances by the local schools orchestra (leaving aside the fact that when there is summer sun in the UK it's likely either to be exam time or home-for-the-holidays time)...
...and if you are lucky, about four pages of dense type with a simple list of departments and courses. Possibly standard offers. No idea at all of anything special the particular university offers. You can go to do "History" at any one of a hundred different institutions, and unless they offer some kind of open day (open days this year are mostly 'online' and timed for just after the UCAS deadline) you are unlikely to learn that the senior lecturer at university 'A' was once chief archaeologist to the Queen, or that research carried out at university 'B' conclusively proved that William didn't conquer anything more than a pebbly beach in Dorset.
Yes, offspring wants to know that the student flats are well looked-after, and that there are plenty of them, but after that some way of distinguishing between Developmental Psychology courses at universities 'C', 'D', 'E' and 'F' would be very welcome instead of reliance on teachers saying "we hear that university 'H' is best for History after Oxbridge but we don't know why Oxbridge is still thought of as the best given that the Grauniad rates Suffolk as the best in the country". (no, really, Suffolk - a university I'd never heard of - is apparently the best in the country for History according to the Grauniad. Or maybe it was the Torygraph. Or perhaps the Stun.
We're doomed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
