Greenmount College reviews
Dan Stockers writes:
I attended Greenmount College in Northern Ireland.
I’m from North Yorkshire and decided that I wanted to completely get away and study somewhere different and so chose to do the degree in Agriculture which is jointly run between Greenmount College and Queen’s University, Belfast. Although I was the only person from outside of Northern Ireland on my course I absolutely loved it. The course is a 3-year course with a 16-week placement in between the second and third year. The best thing about it was that the course was held for the first two years at the agric college with the final year in the middle of Belfast. This meant that you got the best of both worlds, with practical on-farm work on the college farms in the first two years and the experience of living in the middle of a capital city for a year. This not only meant that we got to meet a wide range of people and learn a wide range of topics, but also that we could have an immense social life!
There’s something strangely pleasing in being able to walk to bars, clubs, the kebab shop and then home again when normally that would include a 20 quid taxi! The Irish people are also extremely friendly and I’ve made some fantastic friends. The only bad point about going to Northern Ireland was that it could be a bit steady at the weekends. This is because most of the people on my course had family farm commitments at home, requiring them to go home at the weekends. Although I often went home with them and the free time gave me chance to catch up with work it did get a bit annoying. However, if more people from the mainland UK started to take this course, this problem would soon disappear.
So anyone wanting to get away from the usual UK Agric colleges should definitely have a look out for the Greenmount and Queen’s Uni open days. It’s far cheaper to get over there than you might think as well, if you book the flights in advance it only cost around 70 quid return. Don’t just write it off because it’s in a different country!
Steven Crawford
I graduated with an HND in Agriculture this year (June ‘11) at Greenmount College (CAFRE) in Northern Ireland. I really enjoyed my time there as I had a good mixture of practical hands-on experience and lectures of different modules of varying topics.
The college is well situated not far from Antrim town and Belfast. There were three enterprises to choose from when I arrived in my first year (Sept ‘08) CREAM, CROPS and UPLANDS. I chose CREAM as it was an enterprise made up of 30 high yielding Holstein cows. The reason I chose this one was because I had never milked before and I wanted to learn something new as I have some experience on suckler beef/sheep systems. I enjoyed working with the herd but the three-times-a-day milking took some time to get used to, especially on the weekends.
Moving away from home and living on campus was an experience and it also took some time to get adjusted but I made loads of friends and had plenty of good times. Also I was on the student council as my class rep/councillor which was good to help voice our views and to help organise events. Also as a born again Christian the college has a Christian Union which I really enjoyed and got more involved in during third year.
The HND includes a placement year which is the second year, so for that I got experience on a dairy farm for six months and I spend around 10 weeks each at two different machinery dealers. I really enjoyed the different placements and earned a bit along the way which helped! My lecturers knew what they were talking about when teaching and they were easy to get on with and only too glad to help when I had a problem.
We had plenty of good visits as well, especially to Kildalton college in ROI, Brussels and to good performing farms. To wrap this up I would recommend Greenmount because of the good facilities, staff, experience and courses available. I am currently at SAC Edinburgh to top up to a BSc in Agriculture in my first year.