Entry 10: The Best Days Of Your Life

I have friends who decided that university wasn’t for them, that actually they didn’t want to spend three plus years pissing about, to come out the other end with a piece of paper with ‘Degree’ stamped on it, in addition to being saddled with a sizeable debt.  And yet despite the perfectly logical explanations for why they took the (perhaps preferable route) of going down some other avenue, they’ll often still feel, at least in some part, that they made the wrong choice, or that they missed something. But of course they did not. University is an experience, but then again so is everything else. Here are some reasons why avoiding university isn’t such a bad idea:

 1.  You Will Feel Really Stupid On A Daily Basis

Yes, funny as it seems, if you want to go to into the upper echelons of the educational system, prepare to feel like a complete tool on a daily basis. It is always the same, with anyone I know, in any university, even those who attended university twenty or thirty years ago. You were the top dog in college, you got the grades, the teachers liked you, and it was all good. But now you are right slap bang in the middle; not bad, but not great either. Your classmates will know endlessly more than you, guaranteed. They will tell you offhand about this thing you didn’t read and that thing you have utterly no clue about, not like they mean to make you feel dumb, it’s just you make out you totally understand what they mean, which, by the way, you don’t. This of course means they do it more. Nice move.  Furthermore, at least if you take law, you can count on the majority of your lecturers to be haughty and distinguished men and women who passed with a First with sugar on top, who have written books (some of which may even be on the syllabus), and who contribute articles to legal periodicals, and generally do not have the time or energy to deal with your stupid questions. They make you feel like you only just got the hang of shitting in your hands and clapping, and if you have the courage to actually go and present some queries, prepare to feel like a drooling imbecile.

 2. You Will Probably Have To Attend Seminars

Should you take a course at university, chances are you will have seminars, and if you are studying something even vaguely difficult, the seminars will be your worst nightmare; you, some fellow students (who are smarter than you, remember), and a seminar leader, in a confined space. Not sound so bad? Allow me to elaborate. You will have a sheet for this seminar. On the sheet there will be questions. But that is the easy part. At the top of the sheet, there will be reading. I study law, so on average, I will have between twenty and forty pages of reading to do, per seminar. But then again, on average I have between three and four seminars a week. That is a lot of reading isn’t it. So when you have read it, you will then apply it to the questions. Though chances are, something will come up, that disturbs your reading for at least one of these seminars (and yes, I am including getting paralytic on a Wednesday night as part of ‘being disturbed’). And so, you are going to have to wing it, or at least some of it. Allow me to return to my introduction to seminars; you, some fellow students, and a seminar leader, in a confined space. So for up to two hours you are going to be locked in with some unsympathetic assholes who know more than you anyway, and a person whose sole purpose for that time is to weed out those non-committal scamps who are partaking in the winging of his class. And so you will have to avoid their eyes whenever you don’t know the answer to the question they are asking, and, depending on how violent the ‘disturbance’ to your studying was, this may be often. So you will essentially have to stare at objects around the seminar leader (but not directly at him) for potentially the whole hour or so, desperately trying to avoid his gaze and not stir in him suspicions as to your completed workload. It’s like trekking through Mordor trying to avoid the eye of Sauron as he blazes to and fro, locking on to unlucky souls and booming out questions pertaining to the eccentricities of contract law. And on top of that, you might even be late. LATE. As far as avoiding your teachers wrath goes its equivalent to waltzing into his class totally naked and prodding him in the eye with a rusty teaspoon.

One time I turned up to an EU seminar fifteen minutes late, I’d ran so i was in a cold sweat, and I had been told that this seminar would be particularly important. I saw the room I needed, it was nearly completely glass, one of the newer rooms in the law building. With a mixture of relief and terror I took in a depth breath and turned the door handle. It rattled and did not open. The teacher had locked it at ten minutes past nine. My seminar leader (who was also the lecturer for much of the module, an Austrian of some years who looked at you through a thick pair of spectacles) stopped talking and peered past the desks so his eyes rested on me. The class craned their necks to cop a look at me as I stood there in the glass doorway with my papers. This continued for perhaps ten life-destroying seconds, before he turned away with some bemusement, and continued teaching. And so I had to turn and walk away, in full view of everyone in my class, the long walk of shame out of the building.  You really, really want to learn timekeeping.

 3. Your Union Is Really Stupid

Whether it’s some student show that is going to be on, some pending event coming up, or just your standard club nights getting some publicity, you can take it for granted your students union will annoy the hell out of you. You will need to use it; it’s a central meeting place, there are various bars and pubs, some shops, and a refectory, but if you do, prepare to have a dozen sour faced adolescents soundlessly shove a flyer in your face, for some club night you would never dream of going to. The shit really starts to fly when the annual union elections start, around February or March. Banners start popping up everywhere, with slogans like ‘Choose YOUR student representatives’ , like that’s a big deal. The Union, if you are anything like me, will be where you go to get your lunch, and occasionally where you go to get hammered, and little more. The way the election goes you would think there was a G8 conference on the horizon. There will be garish signs everywhere with gut-wrenching puns plastered across them. For up to a month the Union will be nigh on impenetrable, with tittering idiots dancing or dressing up or singing a song based on their manifesto, or some other such gimmicky shit.  It is all incredibly tedious and unnecessary. Once the election is over you can expect such life changing alterations as a particular item not being stocked at the union shop, just to underline what a crock of shit the whole process is. You will likely lose faith in democracy. I know personally I would much rather we could just re-animate the corpse of Chairman Mao and let him run the Union instead, bloody coups and all. It would be better than the current arrangement.

  

4. Students (Are The Worst)

You can generally expect to develop a deep seated hatred of your own kind. Everything people say and everything people do seems totally stupid. Generally students like to think they know everything when really they know very little at all, having only just reached majority, and with little or no life experience. Give a student a couple of sociology modules and he will come out with an undeserved sense of academia, spouting about the meaning of existence, like an annoying Karl Marx in low riding skinny jeans. Not like I am getting above myself. I know I am almost totally ignorant to what the process of life is all about, it’s just I never pretended to know otherwise. Male students are particularly odious, as generally this is the time when the ego has begun to inflate with the speed and severity of an air bag.  You can tell when a male student is bigging himself up or otherwise talking utter shit. Because this is the time when his mouth is moving. In addition the political-minded orientation of student life will rub some up the wrong way. I mean the student strikes were sort of annoying as well; in fact at Leeds uni most of the biggest lecture theatres were clogged up with a bunch of preachy Che Guevara types, meaning most of the students on the biggest courses (i.e their brothers in arms) were prevented from actually getting work done (i.e they were paying for a service they were not receiving). And miraculously Cameron and Osbourne didn't seem to care that a bunch of very naive unshaven young people had sat on their arses in a few lecture theatres in Leeds; I mean whether or not Rupert Beckett is running to schedule or not is one of their top priorities after all. Of course if you take this approach you will probably get labelled a counter-revolutionary come the great overthrowing of the Bourgeoise. Enjoy being strung up on big metal pipes and beaten like a pinata. I'll be right there with you.

5. The Student Dress Code (Is The Worst As Well)

I can hardly talk when it comes to this. I found out one guy I know actually knew me only as the 'one in the stupid jeans’ for most of the last semester. I think the problem is that I have never mastered the colour wheel (My friend went to great lengths to explain it to me, and showed me how the colours opposite each other generally went together the best. Subsequent to this I did improve, though I had been terrible before; one day I wore orange, blue and purple. I know). But you can expect to see the very worst that style has to offer at university. I just cannot fathom the legions of knuckle-draggers you see in those douchebaggy capris pants, you know the ones I mean, the browny-beigey ones with the white buttons.  I mean my old geography teacher Mr. Murray used to rock a pair just like that, but at least he never had any allusions that he looked fetching in them. Every time you walk across campus it’s like Revenge of The Slacks. The range of colours you can get is horrific without exemption, from a constipated brown to a sort of rice-water beige. These disastrous garments are generally complimented (this isn’t the right word) by some espadrilles; officially the most offensive shoe ever devised. I mean perhaps if you are holidaying in the tropics or are a Venetian gondola controller or something, it sort of makes sense, but outside of that, there is really no cause for wearing these wicker and canvas obscenities, especially as they usually come offered with no socks, which means most of the people at university constantly smell of feet.

Staying within the umbrella of excessively terrible shoes , flip-flops are also a pressing concern, with many young lads apparently under some sort of delusion they live somewhere in eastern Uruguay. No one wants to see your feet; your toenails are too long with sock fluff wedged under them, and you have hair on the backs of your toes. No one wants to see this. Furthermore your feet smell, that’s why you keep them hidden away. It’s like walking around jiggling your bare armpits in everyone’s faces.  And you can hardly walk in them, they hang off the back of your feet like old snake skins and make an annoying clapping noise every time they come back to ground. And while wearing flip-flops in the summertime does retain some logic, you won’t be hard pressed to see folks waddling about in the things well into September. For the winter months (and beyond) it seems most guys have developed an affinity for effeminate military footwear, usually worn with afore mentioned ugly chino pants, which though surely a seasonal thing, have proved an irritation that persists well into the latter half of the year ( Like aggressive hay fever in the summer, followed by a bout of influenza). If you enjoy or approve of wearing trousers that carefully replicate the ‘just violently shat myself’ look, then hey, you will have a wail of a time. But if you have any moral integrity, come prepared.

6. Your Flatmates Might Be Undiagnosed Socipaths

Living away from home is one of the most important steps a young person can take. It is like a sleep over but with the bad bits too. And chances are you will be okay and get on fine with your flatties. But you do hear those horror stories don’t you, and usually they end with everyone so pissed off they wind up quite willing to engage in mortal combat with one another over a blown light bulb. This is a problem made endlessly worse if you start seeing one of your flatmates as well; if it goes sour, history dictates that it gets very awkward, very fast. And if you live with girls, you will be aware for the first time in your life that actually, girls poo as well. And thats always a traumatic discovery. But, if you choose well , and maybe aren't a total pain in the neck yourself, then chances are everyone will be fine. But do be careful. No one wants a bunny boiler now do they.

7. The Student Lifestyle (Might Prove Even Worse Than Those Other Things)

Like many perfectly rational people you might not like jigging about in a dark room with crap music and a bunch of strangers. But if you don’t, then prepare to have a hard time of it. The Law Society once purported to cater for folks who didn’t like clubbing and drinking, I remember, on the first social I went to, when I had only just started at uni. What this turned out to be was that a small part of the function room had been sectioned off, and some J2O’s had been tastefully placed on a few tables there. That was it for the non-drinkers and those whose idea of revelling differed from that of your club-happy types. And that is the general attitude of student life at large, since it’s essentially vomit-centric and if you aren’t bothered about getting plastered you aren’t of much interest to most people.  This is a problem you will encounter outside of university too, but it is amplified when you live in a dorm with a bunch of smelly boys who want to get wankered every other night. Of course you do have some brilliant nights out, it is just, sometimes you do not. But it is best to try it, at the very least. You can have a great time if the time is right.

These are only some of the things that you should definitely be thankful for if you decided not to go to university. Of course there is a flipside to everything; living with people is a sort of rite of passage for later life and settling down. Being included in a vibrant student population has obvious plus points too, and as far as clothing goes you also see some people who look stunning and may even inspire you to develop your own sort of taste or style as you develop as a person (if you are so inclined). University is an incredible experience; that should not be doubted. But it is not the be-all or end-all, it is just one option of many. Not doing it is not equivalent to missing out on anything. At the end of the day, you have to right the make choice for you, and you would be wise, financially at least, to maybe leave university be, and choose a different path. Good luck escaping those chino wankers though. They are everywhere.