I received another email from the transcript office:
Dear Sir
As you have not completed your degree we are unable to provide you with transcripts. We have contacted the Transcripts Office at King's College London (0207 848 3410) and they said that they are unable to provide you with transcripts as well. They said that your department can provide you with Confiramtion of Study. Please contact them on 0207 848 2343.
A full refund will be made in due course.
I guess I'll have to scramble again on Monday.
There are some pretty stark differences between London School of Economics and King's. For one thing, LSE has a labrynthine campus, but a campus it has. King's is spread all over London. The med school is at London Bridge, the business school is at Waterloo, the "main" campus is on the Strand. The "campus" on the Strand (which is the name of a street) consists of two purpose built buildings that are built up against each other and then a bunch of former hotels that are linked to these buildings by enclosed walkways. Not for nothing is this architectural mishmash regularly voted one of the ugliest schools in the UK. It does contain a beautiful chapel, which is something of a cross between byzantine and victorian pre-raphaelite in style, but the exterior of this can only be seen from the windows of some of the former hotels (the whole structure encloses significant space).
Everything is kind of thrown together too. In one "hotel", there might be the Byzantine Studies, Portuguese, and Film Studies departments. One of the basements might have the muslim prayer room, a physics lab, and formerly Maurice Wilkins' lab.
Speaking of Mo, when I first got here and was meeting people I was trying to endear myself to a rather attractive biochemistry postgrad. I started trying to dazzle her with my knowledge of variable tertiary structure in proteins, and moving on, I mentioned:
Did you know that Maurice Wilkins still works here and you can still see him now and again walking around the basement? (as in fact, I had when I was here previously)
Maurice Wilkins is dead.
When did he die?
Last year (Sure enough, on the wall of famous people associated with King's, the inscription that read, "Maurice Wilkins 1916 - 200(4)", the 4 being just painted in over the brackets.)
Needless to say, I never heard from her again.
In any event, LSE, actually has a campus. There are several contiguous victorian-ish buildings built along a small windy street, making the institution look far older than its 100 years. King's by comparison looks like new community college with its concrete and glass facade.
The differences don't end there. King's was founded well, by the King... it is associated with the Anglican Church. LSE was founded by the Fabians who were a socialist group intent on transforming the world through propaganda (and their goals met with a large degree of success).
LSE is certainly more pretigious... everyone from JFK to Soros having attended. If you walk into king's today, you see a lot of normal people. Middle class South Asians studying medicine, upper class Middle Easterners and nerdy East Asians taking engineering, homely looking East Asian girls taking computer science, bored Englishmen taking classics. Of course there is an Asian girl in the classics department, and an Englishman in Engineering. I should hope the limitations of generalizations would be abundantly clear to anyone.
LSE on the other hand. Everyone is attractive. They are dressed to the nines in a sort of nerdy-weezer-esque-retro-pretentious cool sort of way. No East Asians speaking broken English there, they all have upper-crust British accents, and you can be sure they all play the violin and speak at least two other Indo-European languages. No unshaven Middle Easterners wearing skullcaps, rather well dressed Arabs reading Chomsky in the bar. All the children of privilege from all over the world being inculcated with the same ideas.
Far from being socialist, these are people who with their considerable economic clout, tossed in their laps, will control the destiny of much of humanity. With the ideas they get in this environment, they will shape societies from Taiwan to Trinidad... we mortals are so lucky.
Bertrand Russell would be very happy indeed.
Dear Sir
As you have not completed your degree we are unable to provide you with transcripts. We have contacted the Transcripts Office at King's College London (0207 848 3410) and they said that they are unable to provide you with transcripts as well. They said that your department can provide you with Confiramtion of Study. Please contact them on 0207 848 2343.
A full refund will be made in due course.
I guess I'll have to scramble again on Monday.
There are some pretty stark differences between London School of Economics and King's. For one thing, LSE has a labrynthine campus, but a campus it has. King's is spread all over London. The med school is at London Bridge, the business school is at Waterloo, the "main" campus is on the Strand. The "campus" on the Strand (which is the name of a street) consists of two purpose built buildings that are built up against each other and then a bunch of former hotels that are linked to these buildings by enclosed walkways. Not for nothing is this architectural mishmash regularly voted one of the ugliest schools in the UK. It does contain a beautiful chapel, which is something of a cross between byzantine and victorian pre-raphaelite in style, but the exterior of this can only be seen from the windows of some of the former hotels (the whole structure encloses significant space).
Everything is kind of thrown together too. In one "hotel", there might be the Byzantine Studies, Portuguese, and Film Studies departments. One of the basements might have the muslim prayer room, a physics lab, and formerly Maurice Wilkins' lab.
Speaking of Mo, when I first got here and was meeting people I was trying to endear myself to a rather attractive biochemistry postgrad. I started trying to dazzle her with my knowledge of variable tertiary structure in proteins, and moving on, I mentioned:
Did you know that Maurice Wilkins still works here and you can still see him now and again walking around the basement? (as in fact, I had when I was here previously)
Maurice Wilkins is dead.
When did he die?
Last year (Sure enough, on the wall of famous people associated with King's, the inscription that read, "Maurice Wilkins 1916 - 200(4)", the 4 being just painted in over the brackets.)
Needless to say, I never heard from her again.
In any event, LSE, actually has a campus. There are several contiguous victorian-ish buildings built along a small windy street, making the institution look far older than its 100 years. King's by comparison looks like new community college with its concrete and glass facade.
The differences don't end there. King's was founded well, by the King... it is associated with the Anglican Church. LSE was founded by the Fabians who were a socialist group intent on transforming the world through propaganda (and their goals met with a large degree of success).
LSE is certainly more pretigious... everyone from JFK to Soros having attended. If you walk into king's today, you see a lot of normal people. Middle class South Asians studying medicine, upper class Middle Easterners and nerdy East Asians taking engineering, homely looking East Asian girls taking computer science, bored Englishmen taking classics. Of course there is an Asian girl in the classics department, and an Englishman in Engineering. I should hope the limitations of generalizations would be abundantly clear to anyone.
LSE on the other hand. Everyone is attractive. They are dressed to the nines in a sort of nerdy-weezer-esque-retro-pretentious cool sort of way. No East Asians speaking broken English there, they all have upper-crust British accents, and you can be sure they all play the violin and speak at least two other Indo-European languages. No unshaven Middle Easterners wearing skullcaps, rather well dressed Arabs reading Chomsky in the bar. All the children of privilege from all over the world being inculcated with the same ideas.
Far from being socialist, these are people who with their considerable economic clout, tossed in their laps, will control the destiny of much of humanity. With the ideas they get in this environment, they will shape societies from Taiwan to Trinidad... we mortals are so lucky.
Bertrand Russell would be very happy indeed.
posted by akrites @ 7:51 PM
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