Southampton university was opposite in almost every way to Nottingham.

Right from the start they showed much more interest in their future students. For example, the day after I posted my reply slip they rang to see if I was coming (I was very late in posting it). Their 'Come to our open day' pack included all the timetables one might need, a 1-day bus pass for the uni-bus, and a postage paid envelope for returning the reply slip in. The reply slip had my UCAS no. and name already printed on it, all I had to do was tick a box.

I turned out not to need the day ticket as they provided a coach, parked outside the station, with a notice 'UCAS open day' and a student inside with a clipboard to tick us off.

After a couple of attempts to strike up a conversation I gave up. The high seats meant you couldn't easily look at anyone else and I didn't have much to say. Someone at the back was muttering away but they didn't say much. As the open day was for the combined Electronics and Computer Science department, quite a few of the people on the bus were Electronics people.

When we arrived we were lead into the reception area of the ECS {electronics and computer science} building, split into two groups (CS vs E) and asked to take a seat.
This waiting room was actually in the foyer of the building, so it felt more like, say, a doctor's surgery or similar.
When sat down, we were told we would get going very shortly, and in the meantime would we like to take a biscuit (shortbread shaped as the dolphin in the Southampton logo) and a tea/coffee/coke.

Naturally we did, and then it was time to enter the room.

This room was about the same size as the mini-lecture theatre in Nottingham. At the front an OHP with the words "sit where you can read this" was projecting onto the wall.
The introductory talk was performed by Doctor Garratt the admissions tutor. However, I only realised he was a Doctor later, I am almost certain he introduced himself by his first name (which I forgot)

I am in two minds what to think about his presentation style. He certainly didn't just read off the slides, but the use of an OHP in a room with a digital projector was interesting. Especially as the overheads seemed to be freshly photocopied.
Perhaps he is a pragmatist, and stays with what works.
Maybe he hates powerpoint.
Maybe he just saw no reason to adjust what he wrote last year. Nevermind.

The talk was fairly short. He made a couple of light jokes and the atmosphere was assured and relaxed. I remember being asked if anyone used linux. As far as I could see, mine was the only hand that went up.

The main thrust of the presentation was
1) Quality of research
2) Quality of teaching (enhanced by, not at the expense of the research)
3) Cross-fertilisation. The Electronics and Computer Science Depts benefit by being in the same building, and sharing parts of the curriculum. Not only that but there are strong links with other Depts on the campus, such as Psychology. (Presumably HCI benefits from their input).

After the talk we were told we were to have our informal interview (this was mentioned in their letter - we were not given an offer) and various professors appeared at the door with small folders and called our names out.

I followed the one allocated to me, who began by commenting that we were 'Fellow Yorkshiremen', him being from bradford. In his office he asked me a couple of questions, and told me about his research, and the research of his students.
Fascinating stuff on automatically generating meta-tags for images based on AI routes to detect the content. The office was piled up with books like O'Reilly's PERL.

Anyway. I left feeling confident that it most of the lecturers were like this chap I would be able to learn almost anything off them

We then did a campus tour with a comically dry-witted lecturer. On the tour I could almost swear I saw an SGI O2 in the unix lab. Perhaps Erwin was on an exchange trip.

We then came back and were given a student tour, which mostly covered the union. They also gave us a lunch voucher for £3.55 - the cost of a standard meal.

The union was scary. Like somone had made the model for it out of lego, and had used mostly 18-notch grey singles to build it. Everything was made out of concrete. Felt like a Russian research station from Stargate SG-1.
The Combination Cinema / Dance hall / Venue was the best example of this, and it didn't feel very big. Must have been about 250 - 300 seats.
Apparently they have the societies there during freshers week, which does make you wonder how many they have... you wouldn't expect many to fit in it as it is.

The food was... well. Stodgy. The students we were with (Ian and Emma if I remember right) indicated that generally people go into Southampton for lunch.

Over lunch I sat at a table with some Electrical Engineering people and Emma, and troughed the flabby pasta thing I'd selected. Then complained about Nottingham, and asked Emma what the course content was like. By the time she mentioned that writing your own OS was part of the course I was really interested. She didn't elucidate further on that though.

I'll do the executive summary now, as I don't have time to finish this tiring blow-by-blow account. Executive summary:

Students: The walking advert ones were cool. Didn't realy see any others.

Staff: Enthusiastic. Passionate about education. Proud of their student's accomplishments.

Buildings: Old-ish. Kinda ugly in parts. Chip Fab tho. Optoelectronical manufacturing facility. Woo!. Library very large and impressive looking.

City: Large. Spread out. Under-populated.

Union: Decent, not shiny glass and metal, but functioning. Sports facilities.

Research: AI stuff (agents, image recognition)

I'll be adding a journal entry about Southampton soon. This journal-writing business is more tiring than it looks.

I sent an e-mail to the admissions tutor essentially asking him to convince me that his dept cared about education, and asking if I could sit in a lecture.
The email was promptly and politely replied to.

The first point was not answered, which can only lead me to believe that Computer Science department at Nottingham Uni do not actually care very much about education
The second point noted that lectures are only for those people actually enrolled on the course.
My comment on this is that the compsci department didn't want to go any distance in encouraging people to choose their university. They must be so overwhelmed with people desperate to get in. Or, as I suggested to them, it's a university for drifters.
I actually asked 2 students at random during my visit why anyone should study at nottingham. One suggested 'Why not' and the other looked blank and said 'I dunno'. Not exactly scientific, but I took it as indicative. Any nottingham students out there want to refute that, please do!

It's only fair to mention that I am writing this now several weeks after I attended the computer science open day at Nottingham, so my summary will have matured over time

Nottingham is close to where I live and similar and size. The city itself felt very friendly, and I spent a bit of time wandering round before I went to the uni campus.

Whether or not Nottingham is a campus uni seems irrelavent. It's all of 10 minutes away from the city centre and the students themselves casually hire out clubs in the city for their entertainment nights. I shouldn't think there'd be any trouble for people who wanted entertainment ranging from getting drunk in 30 seconds through to a smooth evening jazz session or cultural activities.

I was stopped by a variety of very attractive women and men wanting my support for a variety of charity projects. The ones in it for the money don't care as much as the ones who're doing it for free. Ask them if they get commission, they were upfront with me.

Bizarrely enough I found more M&S's in Nottingham than Boots, but descriptions of the City are best covered in other places. We want to know what the uni is like.

I arrived before the official start time (I followed a bald guy who looked remarkably like Andre Agassi) so I went up the spiral library. This is an amazing top-heavy building that is a spiral. And a library. In the middle of a lake. With ducks.
There wasn't really much more to say about that so I went down to the designated meeting point. This was a foyer reminiscant of a train-station waiting room. A steel-and-glass construction it had the same uncomfortableness you get from knowing everyone can see you, the welded-together seating and automatic doors that open when anything goes past, including the highly rare and expensive canada geese that live on the lake. A lot of students came through, and that, added with the large room, few people, rigid seating that faced people away from each other, meant that there was little motivation to chat and build some kind of collective identity.

A chap bustled in at 10 past (we were told to get there for between o'clock and half past) and took us on a short walk to a small meeting room where he set up a video projector to play the same video they sent us by CD with the invitation to visit. He then disappeared

While we waited for anyone else to arrive we watched the video (I'd had good fun with this: it wouldn't play in windows, but Mplayer did it fine. Odd considering I'd installed Windows Media Player specifically to play it).

After it finished, I said hello to a few people but before we could get talking, he came back and got started on the talk.

The talk was boring. Sorry, but it was. I can remember three things about it.
1) He didn't say anything that wasn't on the website, which I had scoured in advance out of enthusiasm.
2) He said "Well done, you've all passed the first test to coming to Nottingham, as long as you get your predicted grades" or words to that effect
3) He emphasized that they were good at research (without mentioning any research of interest) and that the ratings they had off the government were good (but not the highest available, I noticed). Oh, and they had nice buildings, good surroundings and ducks.

The day just got more and more dull. We were talked through the cost of halls, ISP connection and preferred connection system (win98, under some sort of campus agreement.) and a lecturer took us on a tour of the area.

While the lecturer that took me round seemed nice, we were taken only to public areas and shown things by pointing through windows. How fascinating.
"Over there we have a big room full of computers. You will be able to write programs in java on those, and our software will automatically mark it for you and give you feedback!".
Woo.

We saw a lecture theatre. It was beautiful. Like a cinema. Again with the top-heavy design. Think European parliment on a smaller scale and you have the idea of the decadence with which these were decked out.
You even had personal microphones to talk to the lecturer with (Cos you know, just speaking up is unthinkable. Why work around a problem when you can throw cash at it?)
Needless to say a few of these were obviously damaged, although the building seemed clean and tidy overall.

We asked a couple of questions, but I can't remember what we asked. It was mostly covered by the website. Nevertheless I didn't give up hope.

After the "tour" (quotes because we didn't really see anything) We went back to the main waiting area again. To... watch the ducks or something. We were told we could look round the other campus (The Compsci and business studies depts were in a seperate campus to the main site) by a free bus that went every now-and-again between the campuses.

I bumped into a chap from earlier, before we were split into small groups for the 'tour' and asked him if his experience had been better than mine. He said he hadn't really been listening.
He'd been distracted by the ducks. And the lake. And the pretty buildings.

So he went back to Doncaster and I took the bus to see the main campus.

The main campus is huge. Think of it as a BBC location for a standard country-estate Jane Austen novel.
Now imagine that the country estate is the Student Union. Their union is huge. It has about 5 floors, and several clubs, a hair dressing salon, dvd rental... I could go on. It was bigger than a small shopping centre (or so it seemed anyway).

I wandered lonely as a cloud, until I remembered that they had given me a campus map along with the open day invitation letter.

The whole feeling of the place was huge, and I didn't know where to start. But I felt very much short-changed by the computing dept. They Hadn't said anything about their education, other than other people thought it was good.
They hadn't said anything about what students got up to, work wise, or leisure wise.
So I walked up to the big building that was the central teaching bit, and poured my frustrated little heart out at the reception desk.
The poor chap at reception seemed quite taken aback but quite understanding and helpfully suggested I try the students union. So I went there.

I've already described the union, suffice it to say that I went to their helpdesk and they told me to sit down, take a complimentary year planner (with lots of information about the uni and it's societies) and wait, and they'd get the societies officer to have a chat with me.

So finally I was speaking to a student.
What's more, he'd done a couple of modules at the compsci place. Sadly he couldn't say anything more encouraging about the course or the teaching despite my best attempts to encourage him to (or to say something bad, which he wouldn't do either).
He did tell me about all the clubs and societies which really are too numerous to mention. They had a computer user's group, but I couldn't see a LUG specifically. When pestered he said he knew of people that could get round the restrictions imposed on the hallsnet access tho naturally he'd done nothing of the sort himself.

After that I had nothing else to do, and several more hours to kill. I felt unsatisfied. A university with as much money, and the stature of Nottingham should surely be able to sell itself better than this?
As I walked across the campus an animated Geology / Archeology student was telling a group of attentive parents / prospective students about something to do with digging.

That was what was missing. No-one at nottingham tried to sell the CompSci dept. Perhaps they were ashamed of it so much they had annexed it to it's own campus.

If I had to go to Nottingham, I'd enjoy the social life. But I'd be studying geology and leaving computers as a hobby. Because the Compsci dept didn't seem to think computers are as interesting as I do.

Executive Summary:

Students: Solid good-looking middle class kids who know their way round any sainsbury's in the country, I shouldn't wonder. May have drifted into the uni as it is a good uni without actually thinking about it.

Teachers I met: A slightly camp, short New Zealander who was friendly and polite, but his best feature was having a slight resemblance to Linus.

Admissions: Seemed to see students as an occupational hazard, they come, they go. Meanwhile there's more important things to do

Effort: Poor. Didn't seem that bothered about anything other than their buildings, pretty landscape, ducks, architecture, oh- oh look- there's a duck!, surroundings, wildlife, and hey, look at all the pretty ducks. Continually asked if we had any questions. Seemed anxious to get it all over asap.

Facilities: Well, the buildings were nice. Lots of windows workstations in a big glass building reminiscent of a waiting room in a university. Seperate network for the (2nd year?) hacking contest.

Networks: Halls get something stupid like 100mbs access. Outsourced, standard blocked ports deal. They only support win98. Linux at your own risk.

Accomodation: Seemed really flash but we couldn't see inside it.

Union: Wow. Huge. Exciting.

Notes: Seemed to have a crime problem. Lots of 'keep it hidden' posters etc.
Summary summary: If you're going for a good time, probably a goo. bet: People will respect a degree from Nottingham because Nottingham tells them to, irrespective of the quality of teaching or enthusiam. If you want to enjoy your subject don't study computing, study geology. They like their subject.
Yes/No Summary:
No

Woo. Here's me trying to get a livejournal account (you know you've run out of favours to call in when you can't get one) and Slashdot has been providing one all the time.

I intend to use this initially to log my experiences of CompSci courses and their associated Universities in the UK.