Experiences Of University Life Research Articles

Working the Yucatán in the neoliberal landscape: household management, consumption and the lives of intellectual elite women

This article examines the lives of academic women in Mérida, the state capital of the Yucatán in southern Mexico. In particular, I consider the relationship between work – including household management – and consumer practices in light of Mérida's changing socioeconomic climate. I address how women's lives have been impacted by the neoliberal restructuring of Mexico's political economy and what these changes mean to their experience of university life, household management styles and consumption practices. I point out how labor and consumption are deeply interrelated cultural practices, which have acquired new meanings in the neoliberal landscape. Accordingly, consumption practices must be understood in connection with women's social and professional identities.

Understanding Australian Aboriginal Tertiary Student Needs

Drawing from a study of the experiences of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander university students, this paper presents an overview of the specific needs of these students as they enter and progress through their tertiary education. Extracts from a set of case studies developed from both staff and student interviews and an online survey are used to illustrate what we have categorised as the emotional, motivational, financial, study, literacy, and transitional needs of this particular cohort of students. Our findings, supported strongly by other current research, point to the need for a whole-of-university approach to enhancing the educational and subsequent employment opportunities for Aboriginal students. This includes acknowledging cultural and familial responsibilities, recognising and accommodating Aboriginal knowledge, and ensuring equitable experiences of university life.

The New Vocabulary of Resilience and the Governance of University Student Life

This article examines the governance of student life in university settings through an examination of discourses of wellness and resilience in the university sector, and in particular at the University of Toronto. Resilience, it is argued, is strategically deployed in ways that enjoin students to think positively about their experiences of university life so as to avert any experience of distress or disability. This is undertaken with the aim of producing a healthy and ‘well’ student body, but does little to address inequalities amongst students, nor how such inequalities might be important in addressing student distress. Focusing on an analysis of the University of Toronto Student Life Programs and Services programs and publications, and in particular pamphlets and newsletters, such as Health & Wellness: Helping Students Make the Most of the University Experience (2009), it seeks to understand the role of resilience in the production of student life and the governance of the university experience. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the possibilities and limits of a new vocabulary of resilience (Seligman, 2009), which posits an expectation of suffering as a resource which can be drawn on in times of stress, and the “positive” disciplinary regimes this vocabulary enforces. This examination is carried out with the overall aim of disrupting unexamined relations to representations of institutional sites and services as resources, and to demonstrate how such representations rely on and reproduce notions of difference, disability and distress as difficulties to be both renounced and exploited. It is also to provoke greater recognition within social justice studies of how university health services texts such as the Health & Wellness pamphlet and newsletters directed at students strategically deploy notions of resilience to govern interpretations of resistance as illness, rather than emancipatory action.

Exploring emotion in the higher education workplace: capturing contrasting perspectives using Q methodology

This article presents an original application of Q methodology in investigating the challenging arena of emotion in the Higher Education (HE) workplace. Q’s strength lies in capturing holistic, subjective accounts of complex and contested phenomena but is unusual in employing a statistical procedure within an interpretivist framework. Here Q is used to capture the emotional tone of the working lives of academic and support colleagues in one UK Higher Education Institution (HEI). Research design and data analysis were underpinned by the concept of appraisal, which has an established history in stress and emotion scholarship across a range of disciplines. Four distinct illustrative workplace accounts are presented and analysed in terms of their relevance for individual emotion and wellbeing. The utility of this application of Q methodology in surfacing and comparing differing experiences of university life is discussed and the implications for institutional research and practice are considered.

A Comparison of International and Domestic Tertiary Students in Australia

AbstractIn this study international and domestic students were compared on variables such as accommodation and financial satisfaction, social support, mismatched expectations, academic stress, dysfunctional coping, and psychological distress. International and domestic students (N= 86 for each group), enrolled at a large Australian university based in a capital city, completed a battery of questionnaires. Results demonstrate that in comparison to domestic students, international students had less social support, used more dysfunctional coping strategies and had greater incongruence between their expectations and experiences of university life. The results endorse the significance of providing high quality supportive and orientation programs to international students, to enhance their social support and coping strategies, which, as demonstrated, are lacking.

Competencies for effective leadership in higher education

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to set out to investigate the role of the Pro‐Vice‐Chancellor, Rector, or Principal of a university, and the competencies (attitudes, knowledge and behaviour) that are needed for effective leadership in higher education.Design/methodology/approachSemi‐structured interviews were held with Pro‐Vice‐Chancellors at ten UK universities representative of the sector.FindingsMost respondents perceived that academic credibility and experience of university life were crucial for effective leadership in higher education, and continued with their research and teaching activities alongside their managerial roles. People skills, including the ability to communicate and negotiate with others, were also felt to be important. Most universities in the study had no systematic approach for either identifying or developing leadership skills.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough this was a relatively small study, the research highlights the need for a more proactive approach to identifying leadership competencies and developing leadership throughout universities.Originality/valueThe effective leadership and management of universities is a crucial issue for policy makers, leaders themselves, and for university staff. The research shows that university leadership is fundamentally different from leadership in other contexts, and demands additional competencies. It adds to debates about whether leaders in higher education should be academics, or professional business administrators.

‘Don't you Think you're Missing Out, Living at Home?’ Student Experiences and Residential Transitions

Recent policy shifts in higher education impact on the diversity of student experiences, one such trend is an increase in the number of students staying in their parental home for the duration of their studies. This has implications for students’ experiences of university life, particularly non-academic aspects. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice and habitus, this papers explores how young people go about fitting in to ‘being a student’, and how predispositions to university life influence these practices. Residential status emerges as a key demarcating factor in how successfully students feel they adapt to being at university. Though related to class, this cannot be explained solely by the socio-economic background of students living at home, but rather reflects both practical problems faced by these students as well as difficulties in incorporating a student habitus while living at home.

From metabolic pathways charts to animaps in 50 years

From metabolic pathways charts to animaps in 50 years

‘Seize That Chance!’ Leaving Home and Transitions to Higher Education

This paper interrogates assumptions surrounding the practices of leaving home and going to higher education in England and Wales. As more students from non-traditional backgrounds are encouraged to go to university, this is leading to greater diversity in students’ experiences of university life, and one of the key aspects of this is that more students are choosing to stay at home for the duration of their studies. This paper explores how and why students make the decision to stay at home. While recognising the financial advantages of living at home we argue that the decision cannot be reduced to economic expediency, but reflects young people's access to legitimate cultural capital and family and peer endorsement of leaving home as an expected process and outcome of going to university.

For all these reasons, I do...drink: a multilevel analysis of contextual reasons for drinking among Canadian undergraduates.

Student drinking is largely related to the setting of the drinking occasion as well as to individual psychosocial characteristics. This article assesses the effect of the reasons for drinking on situational alcohol use above and beyond other environmental and individual factors. The data were drawn from the Canadian Campus Survey, a national mail survey conducted in 1998 with a sample of 8,864 students in 18 universities. Each student provided information on up to five drinking occasions, resulting in 25,347 drinking occasions among 6,598 drinkers. At the individual level, this study focused on the university life experience. At the situational level, information about alcohol intake was recorded relative to why, when, where and with whom drinking occurred and the reasons for drinking. Our results show that the reasons for drinking explain 8.3% of the variance in individual alcohol intake per occasion at the individual level and 8.1% at the drinking occasion level. Reasons for drinking and the drinking setting together influence consumption. Moreover, reasons are context specific, because students drink for different reasons in different contexts. Thus, contextual motivational models may be more effective in helping one understand the various pathways to alcohol use and misuse.

Multilevel analysis of situational drinking among Canadian undergraduates

Using a multi-level approach, we examined the contribution of drinking setting characteristics and of individual characteristics on the alcohol intake per drinking occasion. The data are drawn from the Canadian Campus Survey, a national mail survey conducted in 1998 with a random sample of 8,864 students in 18 universities. For each student, up to five drinking occasions were investigated, resulting in 26, 348 drinking occasions among 6, 850 drinkers. At the individual level this study focused on the university life experience. At the situational level, information about alcohol intake was recorded relative to why, when, where and with whom drinking occurred. Our results show that drinking setting is as important as the individual characteristics in explaining the alcohol intake per occasion. Policies aimed at reducing students alcohol intake may be more beneficial if they address both situational and individual factors.

Students with disabilities in post‐secondary education: the perspectives of wheelchair users

AbstractChanges in higher education in the United States usually occur in response to societal attitudes and social and legislative policies. Over the past 15 years, post‐secondary institutions have experienced a significant increase in the enrolment of students with disabilities, a trend that has resulted in more wheelchair users in colleges and universities. Wheelchair users have unique problems among students with disabilities because of the presence of physical barriers in university environments and some negative attitudinal barriers. In this study, the university life experience of six students with disabilities, who used a wheelchair to attend school, was explored. A qualitative methodology involving one‐on‐one interviews was used with two undergraduate and four postgraduate students attending a large urban university. The interview sessions were analysed and the data coded into descriptive themes. The six major themes were: what college education means to us; making choices; personal support network; institutional responsibility; university community; and self‐promotion–a much‐needed business tool. ‘Experience is a wholesome process’ had emerged as a meta‐theme connecting all six themes together into describing the student educational experience. The data obtained describe university life from the perspective of these participants. Barriers to participating in university life are identified and facilitating factors for satisfactory university life are explored. Further research is recommended to understand the factors in a university environment that prevent students who are disabled and use a wheelchair from succeeding. A few suggestions recommended by the researcher are: rural and suburban institutions could be studied separately; studies could be done exclusively with undergraduate or postgraduate students; separate studies should be done with students with different disability categories and disability levels; the support network could be included in the data collection. Copyright © 1999 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Geography at Bedford College, London : Mr. Gordon Manley

MR. GORDON MANLEY will go to the newly created chair of geography at Bedford College, University of London, with wide experience of university life in Britain and as an acknowledged authority on climatology. Mr. Manley graduated at both the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge, where he was an exhibitioner of Gonville arid Caius College, and he has held university posts successively at Birmingham, Durham—as first head of the Geography Department —and Cambridge. His interests in the meteorological aspects of snow-cover may have derived from his enthusiasm for the Peanines and the Lake District as a keen mountaineer and rock climber as well as geographer. A visit to East Greenland as a member of Mr. J. M. Wordie's expedition of 1926 confirmed these interests. More recently he has analysed long-period temperature records in the north of England and revealed the gradual warming of our winters since 1820. The close resemblance between these changes and those for Stockholm suggests that this matter is of far more than local significance. In these early records Mr. Manley sees a valuable source of information that may throw light on the greater climatic changes of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Mr. Manley is, too, a keen but balanced advocate of the geographer's contribution to meteorology. This was the theme of his second presidential address to the Royal Meteorological Society. The Buchan Prize in 1943, the Symons Lecture in 1944, and the Murchison Grant of the Royal Geographical Society in 1947, all marked Mr. Manley's contributions to climatology ; but his papers also include other branches of geography, particularly the history of cartography. Mr. Manley remained at Cambridge long enough to see the university give somewhat belated recognition to meteorological studies by setting up a Meteorological Committee, of which he was the first secretary.