IQ Wave

Where to even begin with IQ. It’s the most expensive university housing offered by Kingston university but it’s also a private company, a separate entity or how it feels when your there, a profit hoarding machine.
Now here’s what you don’t get for that massive price:
— Cleaner, most university halls offer basic cleaning services for communal areas, not here
— That roof garden they advertised? Locked. All year because a group supposedly abused it the year before therefore they judged the new group would be just as bad.
— Sky in the common room? Doesn’t work, the signal is awful. Despite paying for Sky Sports they don’t even get it.
— Space, the little rooms are horribly over priced and have nothing to them. That «en-​suite» bathroom is a pod that’s slightly akin to an aeroplane bathroom.
— A decent shower — The showers are awful, have to be maintained by using a scrubbing device to get limescale off them every couple of days because otherwise it’ll squirt everywhere and soak the whole room.
— Social events? No. IQ advertises that it will do social events but due to the internationalisation of the building it’s incredibly reclusive and apparently always has been. It’s not just our group. The common room hardly gets used, they charge you £1 for the pool table even after you’ve paid all that money for you poor excuse of a room and all that. The common room did recently go under refurbishment but that actually only meant putting up a load of posters and painting a wall. It was reclusive and you had to make an effort to make friends around the building.
— Working lifts. They would break at least once a week and sometimes took up to a week to get fixed. I actually got stuck in one for a few hours during freshers with 4 others.
— Clean air. The smoke detectors are so bloody bad here it’s unreal, the chances are if there is a real fire you’ll die. People smoke in there rooms day in day out and I’m not just talking cigarettes either.
— A fair deal. The room vary massively in size in communal flats and the studios are god awful.
— A decent oven. The oven is awful. Full stop.
— Good management. This is slightly unfair if you take it just on the day to day but if something goes wrong in your flat, it won’t be fixed by management. We had a problem with our communal area and it getting messed up by other people and had people steal stuff all the time. Instead of trying to solve the problem management simply tried to charge £50 each to bring professional cleaners in to clean it. That’s from 7 people as well. £350 people to clean a kitchen? Your mad.
— Nothing is included. I noted the cleaner above, but no bin bags, no recycling boxes, nothing.
— Cheap Laundry? No. Students should always have to pay lots to do their washing.
— A cool room. That window in your room wont open more than 2 inches. Your room will get insanely hot very quickly. I had to sleep with the covers off for most of the year.
Now there are a few good things about IQ and I’ll talk about them too.
— The internet is incredibly fast
— You can stroll in whenever you want with your keyless entry system, you can be drunk, you can be naked, you can walk in backwards and security won’t have a go at you. They were really laid back like this which was great.
— You get lots of chairs in the kitchen and the kitchen is huge in communal areas. If your a fan of chairs, this might be the place for you.
— Location. By far the best out of all the student halls for Kingston. Located in between Bentalls and John Lewis.
One of the main problems with IQ and it being a company that’s nothing to do with the university is that it’s only interest is making money. It doesn’t care about you.
I might add that I actually had an amazing year staying here. I had some great friends, loved how laid back they were most of the time and managed to deal with all the terrible things that were there. The reason for the 1* rating is that as a building, halls, business it’s just terrible. The reason I had a good time is because me and my friends made it a good time. We made the most of a bad situation. If your in the other halls you’ll have a way better time. Seething Wells is the place to be.
Just don’t waste the vast amount of money that you would have to spend to stay here. It will be a waste. Your gonna be a student, you don’t want to get yourself into a lot of debt. Get involved with the Uni halls. KUSCO may be a pain but trust me, IQ is not the place to be.