Thanks for the reply. Just looked up at Leeds on Wikipedia - I'd assumed it was a fairly mid-range institution (and so I thought there'd be other institutions

Thanks for the reply. Just looked up at Leeds on Wikipedia - I'd assumed it was a fairly mid-range institution (and so I thought there'd be other institutions the same or worse, but many which were better). Just found out it's in the Russell Group. Christ. I (partially) retract my earlier respones. I study CS (just finished first year) in the UK at a institution that usually places in the top 10... now you mention it, a lot of students do match those described by you and others. However, it's easy to ignore these people, since they never go to lectures (I have friends on other courses who say they attend on average 1 lecture a term...) It's trite, but with university, I feel you get out what you put in. The opportunity to mix with the people who are bright and motivated (and they do exist) is great, as is having a library full of free programming books. For every student who only goes to party, there's one in the CS building late at night writing a Scheme parser in Haskell. (OK, the ratio's probably more like 3:1, but you get my drift). On the other hand, I feel like I've learned about as much from pursuing independent projects than I have from my course, though the resources on campus make such projects easier. BTW, a large part of me is thinking about dropping out of university at some stage and startup a startup - read too much pg - so I've been thinking about the value of university lately. CS is a bit of an odd subject in this regard - with a lot of subjects^, I'd guess a majority of students don't expect their degree to be useful in their future careers (how many history grads become history teachers?), so it's understandable that many would just see their degree as a career ticket. I do actually hope to learn useful stuff on my course, but I'm not sure if I'd learn more by dropping out and starting up. *Exceptions I can think of - Law, Medicine, and possibly foreign languages, Engineering, and Economics. Also more 'vocational' subjects like Nursing.