Studying at University: how to adapt successfully to college life

The transition from school to university is a challenging one. Leaving aside the intellectual and financial demands of higher education, the negotiation of the social gulf between the life left at home and the one encountered at university can be very daunting for many students. It is a task for which many 18 year olds are unprepared and for which the pastoral systems of many universities are ill equipped to support. This book explains to new and prospective undergraduates what they should expect from a university experience. The strength of the book is its practicality. The writer deals with the realities of university life and the advice on how to study at undergraduate level is good. There is kindly advice for less confident students about how to present an argument in a seminar and what to expect from tutorials. There is a serious attempt to explain the effects of the culture shock that many students face at university and reassurance about withstanding its effects. All of this will be very useful to the traditional 18-year-old student embarking on university study at a traditional university but this is also the limitation of the book. It is written about a university system that is in a state of transition and the prospective student population to which it is addressed is growing and changing beyond the boundaries of the readers identified by the author. Adults embarking on foundation degree courses and young people entering higher education through vocational routes will continue to represent a major challenge to historical notions of the nature of university study. Many of the assumptions that lie at the heart of the book sit uneasily with these developments. The acceptance of the correlation between prolific research and high quality teaching is the premise that lies behind the author's advice on how to choose a 'good' university, for example. Readers who spent their undergraduate years in lectures delivered by those more interested in research than teaching, may disagree.

The book will help to prepare 18 year olds who are following the traditional route from school to university for the change. Given the rapidly changing face of higher education, it is a missed opportunity, though, and I suspect that the potential readership is far wider than the one addressed by the author.