Stop scheduling lectures at opposite ends of campus

Whoever is in charge of scheduling lectures must get some sadistic pleasure watching the students of Liverpool suffer on a day to day basis.

Your timetable is full of 9ams and random gaps that are either way too short to get any real work done or drag on for hours until you give up and go home. Your lecture theatres are never conveniently placed; one is on north campus and the other is halfway across Liverpool on south campus. The sadists in the office seem to go out of their way to make your timetable your worst enemy.

It’s a long walk to the Sherrington

It’s bad enough having one lecture after another. But having to drag your ass from Rendall all the way to the Sherrington in less than 10 minutes is the true definition of hell. You either arrive sweaty and out of breath and have to face the judgement of everyone in the room, or you arrive 10 minutes late and face the wrath of your lecturer and their witty comments as you desperately try and find a seat.

If you’re on a big course, you end up with the  mass exodus as your entire lecture group travel across campus. Logically, the lecture would be in the same room, with only the lecturer changing, but this is never the case.

9am lecture? No. 4pm lecture? No.

Is it a sponsored walk? Is it the second coming of Jesus? No, it’s just a herd of law students following each other from the Sherrington to the South Campus Teaching Hub, with one person at the front feeling like the chosen one and strutting across campus with Godlike purpose as their disciples follow them. This can cause issues for other students migrating across campus, who can get caught up amongst the crowds and are unable to escape. Their only options are to make a break for it, pushing throught bags full of heavy law text books and risking being sued, or accepting their fate and face their new life of being a law student and continue on with the crowd to the lecture.

IT’S TOO MUCH

If you are lucky enough to have mornings off, or even days off, you find your timetable is completely unbalanced, with one day where you have endless lectures and tutorials in a row. After sitting through hours of lectures in a stuffy, under -ventilated lecture theatre, the last thing you want to be doing is dragging yourself up miles of stair cases to get to a tutorial, but, of course, the people in the office have decided that hours of lectures followed by a 4pm tutorial in the warmest room in the world is exactly what you need.

The safe haven for awkward timetable gaps

Or, the exact opposite will happen: you’ll be stuck having to come in for just an hour when you could have just had the day off,  or having a awkward break in the middle of your lectures that is simultaneously not long enough and too long.

Do you have time to go home for a nap? No. Go into town? No. Get some real, productive work done in the library? No. You’ll find yourself aimlessly wandering around campus, trying to find something to do and eventually give up and resort to trying to find a seat in the library, telling yourself that you’re going to get a lot of work done, when in reality all you do is spend the entire time scrolling through Instagram.

If you had the choice, you’d schedule all your lectures and tutorials for Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, you’d never be in before 11, and you’d never be in after 3. But you don’t have a choice. You’re in timetable hell. And the schedulers are laughing.