Royal Holloway, University of London

Beautiful campus, great faculty, good financial support for PhDs. Great Researcher Development Programme to help students with research skills.
It's a bit remote in Surrey in a lovely but small town. The rail station is a 25 minute walk even though the tracks go right by the campus. They should build a rail station at Royal Holloway to improve access to London. It would make it a much more desirable place to be a student. Also, facilities like bathrooms are often broken. Maintenance should be improved. There are too many students for the size of the campus. The library is bursting at the seams and they are trying to increase the number of masters students. Where are they going to go? There's no room! They've had to turn study spaces into classrooms. Unless they go to online teaching, there is no room to increase the student body. They need to at least build some more buildings, there is plenty of room on campus. I also wish they would clear out some of the forest to provide more accessible green spaces. Much of the campus can't be accessed because its all forest that is fenced off. There is no PhD community so it's very isolating. The weekends on campus are dead. They should open the cafes, eateries and bars on campus on the weekends. Graduate students would use the spaces even if undergrads don't. The campus is really more for undergrads. Postgraduate students are more of an afterthought. The SCR and other PGR spaces like reading rooms should be improved and not be used as classrooms. Whenever we make suggestions on improving PGR life, they get shot down. Improve networking for London based PhD students. There is no community for PhDs.

The price was good and glad to have a one bedroom for couples. However, the building is in need of refurbishment and couples were placed in the same hall as undergraduates which makes no sense. We should at least be in the Postgraduate halls sonce couples tend to be postgrads. Also, post is not handled well. We don't have our own mailboxes, it all just gets jumbled together which is not secure. There is no post office on campus and the parcel room isn't open on weekends or past 5pm so parcels often can't get delivered at all if they come out of hours.