Uni Mate

Is uni all it’s cracked up to be?
Halls-of-residence sage Alex Palmer found the cracks were everywhere.

University! Three years of drinking, sex, parties, drinking sex-parties, sexy party drinks and... What was I saying? Oh yeah. You make loads of friends, wonderful memories, and you emerge with great qualifications with the world at your feet. What could possibly go wrong?

Uh...a lot.

If you get caught up in the whole ‘Mate! Uni!’ frenzy that takes up most of sixth form, it’s easy not to think about what you’re actually doing. You’re leaving everything you’ve ever known to go live with a bunch of strangers in a faraway place. If you also consider that your main purpose there is to work your arse off, as well as the astronomical loans you’ll take out to pay for it, it’s quite a commitment. You have to be 100% sure you’re prepared to make it, otherwise you might end up me.

My hideous story begins on results day last year. I was up horribly early to catch my grades on the UCAS website, and I was eager to see if I’d failed at life.

And I had!

Well, enough to ensure I didn’t get into my first choice university anyway. I was, however, offered a placement by my backup choice. This was a place I knew nothing about, and I think only chose because I heard you could smoke in the halls. But I decided to accept the offer anyway, because I’m a moron. ‘It’ll all work out, right?’ I reasoned. ‘It’s uni!’

And that was it. One summer later, I found myself traversing the barren English wastelands to this university I’d apparently deemed suitable. I won’t name it, of course, out of respect for their reputation (read: fear of assassins). Anyway, having been to just one open day, I remembered literally nothing about the place before I arrived. However, I was still optimistic. Uni, mate. Uni.

As a new student, I was promptly directed to what I can only describe as the ‘Registration Pit’. This was a ramshackle collection of tents, each with an enormous queue of people spewing out. There were a few second-years on hand ‘helping out’ (which apparently just meant ‘talking amongst themselves’) and a particularly sadistic one informed me that I’d have to visit all these tents, in order to “effectively complete the registration process”. Awesome. I spent roughly half of my lifespan there, filling out forms, collecting forms to fill out later, shaking hands, and filling out more forms. It was like a bureaucrat’s wet dream.

Finally, they let me go. I found my way to the halls-of-residence, and went to check out my flat.

As I ambled into the kitchen, I discovered my new flatmates were already there, talking about...uni, mate. They turned to face this awkward, lanky creature who had just intruded, and we sized each other up. Well, I sized them up. They were probably just wondering who I was and why I was staring at them.

First thing I noticed was that they were all male. Not exactly what I was hoping for. They were all essentially the same person as well; so they’ve blended together in my mind as one gel-encrusted, gym-frequenting personality vacuum. I call it the ‘Lad Collective’.

After an awkward moment of silence, this testosterone-heavy entity introduced itself, giving its names as things like ‘Blokey McBlokington’, and ‘Carlsberg Punchstuff’. It also informed me that two of its individual head-nodes were studying Paramedic Science, and three were doing Physiotherapy. I was slightly confused as to why either of those required academic degrees, but more concerned with the fact that I was doing English (or so I thought. More on that later). How did this happen? I was expecting my flatmates to be doing different courses to me, but not the same as each other. I’d only just arrived, and I already felt alienated.

That evening, I got invited to a flat party. I was a tad perplexed as to how that was happening, since nobody knew anyone yet, but I went with it. However, I quickly found that student parties were not my idea of a good time. I had dubstep (which is the worst thing in the history of...ever. But that’s a whole ‘nother article) pounding obnoxiously into my brain, and I was surrounded by studenty people, wearing chequered studenty shirts and sporting studenty fringes, buzzing around like smug little horseflies. They were incredibly pleased with themselves simply for being there, and I couldn’t relate to any of them. The conversations I overheard were depressing. Everybody just talked at each other, rather than to. For example:

“Yeah mate, this party’s sick. Bare got with that fit girl over there*.”

“Yeah mate, wasted as, to be fair. Drunk a whole bottle of vod, didn’t I?”

“...”

“Yeah mate. Bare got with that fit girl over there.”

*They talk like that because it’s ‘ironic’. Not because they’re actually idiots or anything. Not that at all.

Then they’d just move on and repeat themselves to someone else. They were trendy little automatons, programmed to say stereotypical catchphrases and fuel themselves with supermarket vodka. I felt suffocated, so I spent most of the time I was there being, well, not there. I found myself an inviting wall outside and leaned against it, deciding cigarettes would be preferable company.

Fun Fact: If you insert the image of me smoking alone into various scenes, you’ll have a neat little portfolio of my university social life.

Right. So far, I didn’t like my flatmates (or anyone else) and the social scene was a few sugars short of my cup of tea. There was one bar/nightclub on campus, and that was it. The so-called town it was attached to was so dead I was surprised it even had running water. One more for the list of things I should’ve checked before going. All my hopes now rested on the quality of the academic life.

So, being told I couldn’t actually do the course I’d applied for wasn’t the best start. Yeah, apparently, when UCAS assured me I was doing an English degree, it was just joking around. Haha! Good one, UCAS!

No, it turned out that I, along with the other Humanities (that’s English, Media, and anything else that doesn’t really benefit the world) students, had merely applied for a ‘Humanities Degree’. We’d have to choose individual ‘modules’ from a range of subjects, in order to create “a customised and wide-ranging learning experience.” Surprisingly, I didn’t want a customised and wide-ranging learning experience. I wanted to do the degree I’d frickin’ applied for.

On top of this, I was then faced with two grinding weeks of unnecessary ‘induction lectures’, which covered everything from plagiarism warnings to ‘study skills’, apparently in case any of us had never been to school before. By the time the term finally started, I was already fed up. And things did not get better from there.

The university had admitted about 50 times the number of students it could actually handle, so unless you happened to be Jean-Claude Van Damme, it wasn’t easy getting seats in lectures. Everything was so overcrowded that the professors simply couldn’t teach properly. Nobody got the attention they needed, and we rarely found out anything we needed to know because of the faulty (and/or evil) computer systems controlling everything. Good lord, if they roped me into taking a course I despised, they could at least have organised it properly.

Eventually, after several weeks of this crap, I just gave up. I was tired, disillusioned, and I needed to leave before I started gnawing my own limbs off or something. At this point, I didn’t even care about the impact it might have on my future. I just wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.

So, to summarise: If you take the university decision too lightly, you might easily end up doing a course you hate, in a place you hate, surrounded by people you hate. It won’t all magically work out just because it’s ‘uni, mate’. I learned that the hard way, but you don’t have to. Just be careful where and what you apply for, and make sure you know everything you need to before you accept a placement. Otherwise, you’ll take nothing away from the experience except a large debt and a crushing sense of failure. Have a nice day!