TSR makes me feel old (thestudentroom.co.uk)

Member Name: sun-is-shining

Product:	thestudentroom.co.uk
Date:	22/06/09 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: info on schools and universities

Disadvantages: users all very young

The Student room

The student room is an Internet forum for UK students and international students that are interested in studying in the UK.

The websites provides articles and guides about schools, universities, student finance and all everyday subjects in the life of a student. The most popular feature is certainly the forum where you can discuss everything from the latest UCAS courses to annoying teachers to your new hair colour.

You have access to all of these features without an account but to write in the forum and actively take part in The Student Room you'll need to set up an account.
Doing so is pretty easy and straight forward. It takes only 2 min and you only need an e-mail address, no real name, address or photo is needed.

As soon as you filled in all required info they'll send you a mail to activate your account. You can add as much info to this as you like, where you come from, your university, interests etc.

My big mistake was to mistake The Student Room for an online forum for university students. See, in most languages you'll have a different term for school kids (as here pupil) and university students. After setting up an account I soon realized that topics like GCSE exams and the latest music album are more wildly discussed than courses and universities. There is a section for universities in the forum but honestly, it's pretty dead in there.

But it's a great way for me to learn about student life in England.

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The TRS Wiki

You'll find helpful articles here sorted into different categories.
Choosing a subject is the first section, than choosing the right university for you and how to apply using UCAS which can be quite complicated from time to time.
Student life tells you about weekly budgets, how to prepare for exams and who to ask for help if needed.

The next section is about the part of life that is spend far away from schools and universities - gap years and travel Tips follow essays about beauty, fitness and the latest music releases.

The articles are written by volunteers and vary from very helpful to uninteresting rants.
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Revision Notes

Here you can find the revision notes of other students sorted by subject. These notes are normally on a high standard and are submitted by the users. It's always useful to check what others are doing and compare your notes to theirs.
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Personal Statement

Here you can get help on writing your personal student when applying for university. You can even submit your statement and get it checked if it is suitable and written in the right style. I haven't used that feature but from the forum I gather that it's very helpful
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The Forums

This is the most popular section of The Student Room. The Forum is subdivided into sections and you can find something for every topic and liking.
Basically the only rule is that no illegal and adult things are allowed to be discussed, apart from that feel free to talk about whatever you want.

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I set up an account basically to read up about different universities and to get help on finance and accommodation. The forum was not very useful but I found the articles very helpful.
Of course I started to read the forum as most of the topics are very funny and amusing - a great way to waste your time when you have nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon.

It gets quite boring after a while when you are over 20, the majority of users seem to be between 16 and 18 and you can guess that there are many, many threads about break-ups, make-up and sit-ups.

So, it's a nice social network site where you can have sometimes interesting sometimes annoying discussions with strangers - and sometimes you can pick up some useful info as well.

Summary: an ok-ish social networking site