Am I being jealous for no reason?
So my uni isn't high ranked, I didn't used to think this was an issue. I'm a mature student and I'm often involved in recruitment at my job, we have never even considered uni name in recruitment. Also as my uni has a lot of students who aren't very engaged it has been pretty easy to be selected or elected for anything I fancied doing.
However, recently I have been going to a few conferences and events where I've met people from other unis and we have chatted about our subject and it has been amazing. At home we are still struggling through the very basics, like literally defining the words in the module titles. I have life and industry experience and could have written pretty much every assignment I've done this year before I started. I'm comfortably getting a first, just losing marks on essay technique as I'm used to writing for different purposes.
However, I'm aware that while the conferences and symposia are held in universities, they are full of the really keen students from across the UK. I'm also aware I'm an undergraduate and most of the people there are PhD so probably the undergraduate students in the next room are still learning basics.
I really don't want to seem big headed, I'm a mature student with years of experience, of course I know more than an 18yo. There is just a little bit of me that loves getting really stuck into a topic and sitting in a room of people chatting, messing about on phones and then not knowing who the prime minister is in a politics lecture is not really giving me anything to grab on to.
I'm feeling really guilty but starting to look at postgrad options elsewhere. I'm not sure if maybe I'm not being fair comparing first year undergrad with the conferences though.
Long term it might even be a bad idea to put myself in a more competitive environment when I'm doing really well where I am. I am not a rich teenager, I have loads of extra challenges. Why set myself up to fail?