University of South Wales

I really enjoyed my course, intense but learning a lot. The university’s services however, are absolutely horrendous. I’ve had a worst experience with accommodation, mainly because of its terrible communication - they would never fix a problem, totally ignore you or just give you mixed information and one sentence responses. Just really unhelpful. IT was also unhelpful. I would make multiple tickets to get help with software that wasn’t working but they would mark them as solved when my issue was not resolved. Software would run remotely off their internal app so would be painfully slow, impacting my assignments. They claim they’re busy but spend all day chatting in their office whenever I’m there. Timetables were late and always wrong, making it hard to work. The unis accommodation contracts and library service hours were unaccomodating to masters students that study through summer. Took two months after arriving to get a bank letter from the uni to open a bank account, putting people in an awkward position with cash. There’s no central system for tuition payments, at least for international students. I just wired money and never got a receipt from them to say that they got it. I did some work for the uni and still am yet to be paid by the union, 3 months later. Just constantly have to follow up with everything I email the university about. Treforest is unsafe, never feel comfortable walking at night and nothing to do. Just overall quite incompetent and dysfunctional. Even though my course was good, I would definitely not recommend this university due to the services and facilities.

Absolutely terrible experience. Expensive for the area and the room quality. Dirty when I moved in, carpets disgusting, drains clogged. Our vacuum is broken - they refused to fix it or replace. Just told us to walk up to the office to borrow theirs. There’s always workers just coming into the flat, don’t say hi or what they’re doing, just walk into our rooms with their shoes on. The front door of the building never closes properly but security/accommodation never bothers to fix it. Ive been locked out three times now because my keycard just doesn’t work and have to go down to security to fix it. One of the only social spaces, the hub, is never open in the evening or weekends (even though security could check in at those times when staff aren’t there). I had difficulties extending my contract into the summer as a masters student - they took so long getting back to me when I asked about summer stay which is stressful when I don’t know if I’ll have a place to stay. There was a lot of back and fourth with emails, where they either didn’t understand what I was asking or they would give me one word/sentence answers or not even answer my question so I had to constantly ask for clarification. Just not good at communicating. When I paid my accommodation fees, I never got a receipt or email confirmation so had no idea if they’d got my money. Laundry and Wi-Fi are good but overall, too many bad experiences with property management so would not recommend staying in halls.