Running up that hill, with no problems


Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Category: Musings

Right now I’m sitting in one of my happy places on the Strath campus, doing a bit of tidying and sorting admin as the spring term begins.

One of my professors reminds me that registration is open for next year’s intake, beginning in September, in a gently-nudging, “spread the word” sort of way.

I am very sparse with my praise, as you might have noticed, but there’s no hesitation here. I cannot recommend this course, and this university, highly enough.

You should come to Glasgow and do the course. It’s January, so you have plenty of time to start planning it now.

The best part? You do not need to be a lawyer. You do not have to have any intention to become a lawyer. (I don’t.) Just prove that you have a bachelor’s degree (even my twenty-five year old one in a totally different field was good enough), and that you have a track record of working on, well, the stuff that I work on.

The professors are brilliant and friendly and look at you as a fellow colleague. They don’t bite.

As for the wider university experience, please remember that this is small-s socialist Scotland. Nobody cares about your age, your nationality, your colour, your race, your accent. Nobody even looks at you twice, or sideways once. Nobody cares. This has been an amazing thing for me to experience, as someone who is 1) literally twice the age of many of my classmates and 2) did my undergrad, in the previous millennium, in a hyper-judgemental and Darwinian environment. Here, it literally doesn’t matter.

Honestly, I’ve never been in such an inclusive and welcoming environment in my life. I don’t want it to end.

Might have to do something about that, in fact.

So what’s the catch? You will need to get used to being on a city centre urban campus which was built on the spot where an ancient glacier apparently stopped, leaving a part of town where the streets go up at angles of 13° or more. Have you ever seen a street so steep it has a handrail? You will here. The campus is so up-down vertical that it looks and feels like a kid made it on Minecraft.

You, your knees, and your lungs get used to it, though. Hill, what hill?

It doesn’t hurt me. Do you wanna feel how it feels?

The Author

I’m a UK tech policy wonk based in Glasgow. I work for an open web built around international standards of human rights, privacy, accessibility, and freedom of expression. The content and opinions on this site are mine alone and do not reflect the opinions of any current or previous team.