Students: stop being self-centred and care more about charity

It’d be easy to stumble through your years at University being totally self-centred – half the time drunk and the other hungover. The ages 18-22 are arguably the most independent and free of our lives. This is all very well, but it does not mean that we should ignore the world revolving around us.

Students often only worry about themselves

Many of you will have experienced the guilty moment when the plumber or Virgin man came into your accommodation to see you sitting in onesies or dressing gowns, watching daytime TV at 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon surrounded by Dominoes boxes and cheap alcohol.

Even if you do consider yourself outside of this lazy bracket – however much you reckon you smash it in the ASS or during your labs – being a student is always going to be half as hard as having a real job. Students have a lot of time and we should do something useful with it.

Student attitudes towards charity can be wrongheaded. Helping others is often pigeon-holed as a kind of ‘gap yah’ farce. People think of a boy or girl from the Cotswolds cradling a stack of impoverished African children and uploading a ‘selfie’ onto Instagram, hashtagging #Malawi and #Summer2k13.

Admittedly, this does vaguely represent some of what charity means for students at Russell Group universities. The problem here lies with using this as a justification to dismiss helping others as a waste of time, effort and resources. Just because there are some extremely annoying rahs who embarrass us abroad, doesn’t mean you should laugh at and dismiss anyone who does something to help others. Indeed, you certainly shouldn’t let such morons put you off getting involved. 

What could student charity involve? At the lowest level this could mean the next time a friend runs the Bath Half Marathon (believe me, they will) don’t think ‘I can’t be bothered to sponsor them’. The fact is many (not all) of you will end up spending the same amount buying you and your already inebriated friend a drink on the Triangle later that week or on an insignificant item in Clifton Down Sainsbury’s. At a higher level, you and your friends can get involved in the student charity network.

Engaging in charity is not a desperate attempt to disprove the assertion of Dawkins that altruism doesn’t truly exist in nature (#theselfishgene). Anyone who says charity is selfless needs their head examined. Helping others can be just as rewarding as helping yourself, both in terms of your CV and your soul.

This piece is not meant to shout patronisingly from a moral high ground, I regret I did not realise earlier in my degree the importance of a varied student lifestyle. I found myself preoccupied with socialising, my course (loosely) and having a ‘good time’, completely missing the potential the student experience allowed me to engage with the wider world. Don’t make the same mistake.

As unoriginal as this may sound, we should all have a good time and make the most out of the best years of our lives; but we shouldn’t forget that there are other people out there who don’t have the opportunities we have – and we could do something for them too.