University College London - UCL (reviews)

UCL is London’s leading multidisciplinary university, with more than 13,000 staff and 42,000 students from 150 different countries. It is a cosmopolitan university with 48% of international students and 35% international staff.

Academics at UCL

UCL is formed by eleven academic faculties:

1. Faculty of Arts and Humanities
2. Faculty of Brain Sciences
3. Faculty of the Built Environment
4. UCL Institute of Education
5. Faculty of Engineering Sciences
6. Faculty of Laws
7. Faculty of Life Sciences
8. Faculty of Mathematical and Physical Sciences
9. Faculty of Medical Sciences
10. Faculty of Population Health Sciences
11. Faculty of Social and Historial Sciences

Within these faculties, there are over 100 departments, institutes, and research centers. UCL offers over 400 undergraduate programmes and over 650 postgraduate programmes in a broad range of fields.

The public research university gives access to its students to a great variety of cultural and academic resources as libraries, museums, and collections.

With more than 150 Erasmus partnerships and other partnerships with renowned institutions worldwide such as Columbia University or Sciences Po, UCL offers a unique learning experience to its students.

Campus & Student Life

University College London’s main campus is in the Bloomsbury area of central London.

It provides its students with numerous high-quality resources and facilities such as:

• 18 specialist libraries with more than two million books and subscriptions to more than 35,000 journals, and historic material in Special Collections.
• Courses in 17 languages at the UCL Centre for Languages & International Education (CLIE)
• Three museums: the UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, the UCL Grant Museum of Zoology, and the UCL Art Museum. The university is also home to special collections of archaeology, geology, ethnography, science and engineering.
• The Bloomsbury Theatre and the Bloomsbury Theatre Studio, where student productions take place
• Sport facilities (full-size football, rugby and lacrosse pitches, basketball, badminton and volleyball facilities, Bloomsbury Fitness)
• Four cafés, three bars, two shops, an events venue, a gym, and a hair salon.
• Study spaces, with plasma screens, desktop computers, white boards, tables for group work and sofas.

Besides its great academics, UCL also provides a large option of social and sport opportunities. The Student Union counts more than 250 societies and sports clubs, which allow students to discover something new or continue their passion. The groups are run by students and consist of a great way to meet friends and develop new skills.

Career and Alumni

After they graduate, UCL assures that 90% of its students enter the workforce or further studies in a six-month period, and earn around £3,000 more than the national average.

UCL has a total of 250,000 alumni in 190 countries. There are memorable and honorable alumni, including founding figures of nations such as of India (Gandhi), Kenya, Mauritius, Ghana, and modern Japan and Nigeria; the inventor of the telephone, and one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Other notorious discoveries by UCL academics include five of the naturally occurring noble gases, the invention of the vacuum tube, the co-discovery of hormones, and several foundational advances in modern statistics.

There are at least 29 Nobel Prize winners like Peter Higgs, Owen Willans Richardson, William Henry Braggand among others, and 3 Fields Medalists amongst UCL’s alumni and current and former staff.