The final excuse, the bridge between the acne-ridden days of secondary school and what is so fondly described as ‘the rest of your life.’ Between the hours of drinking in the evenings, recovering from drinking in the mornings and deciding where to drink in the afternoons, you may decided that the £9,000 you managed to squeeze out of student finance after the seemingly never-ending negotiation process wasn’t meant simply for vodka and Jaffa cakes.
In my personal experience of actually being a student, I have learnt a series of life lessons such as ‘Wikipedia will always be there to give those answers that you never really needed before the serious hours of cruising the internet, that 11pm in the evening is a reasonable and – even generous time – to start a 2,500 word essay for a 12noon deadline the next day, the outlaw style of dodging television licensing and the subsequent weeks of discussion with your housemates on whether you should finally move away from your days of the criminal life and pay that £30 each is not an easy decision to make.
However, there are also those lessons and facts that are suspended out of your conscience for the 3 years or so of your study that will eventually catch-up when you are finally convinced that paid work is probably the best way to progress with your life. This will incorporate questions such as “people do get up at 7am in the morning?” and, of course “since when did my week-old glass of squash constitute as mess?”
I believe that all these questions will come to mind after the days of university however don’t take my word for it as I still live in the wonderland that is university and, like the facts and figures I write in my exam papers, my expectations of post-student life are merely educated assumptions.
What isn’t there to love about university life or as I like to call it, the 3-year weekend (with added essays and deadlines)?
Well in my personal opinion – not much. Where else is it perfectly acceptable to claim a hard day’s work after 3 x 1hr lectures? Where else can you wake up in the morning and use the excuse “Well I could do work, however I am incredibly hung-over and therefore would not excel to the task of the current expectations of my lecturers and peers if I partook in my lectures for the day”. Or, in other words, look at the nine o’clock alarm and simply grunt the phrase ‘naaah’?
I guess the point I’m trying to emphasise is that university life is one of a kind, there is nowhere in the world where general laziness and living in squalor is celebrated by such a huge population of like-minded future generations of intellectuals…. and sports science students.