How to prolong your time at Leeds

Graduating this year? Panicking about life in general? Read this guide and pretend the real world isn’t coming.

Run for Exec

You know those Exec guys? The ones whose faces are all over the Union walls but you never actually know what they do? Yeah, they’re not even students.

Seems like a pretty good deal to graduate from uni straight into BNOC status with a salary attached. You even get paid to edit The Gryphon.

Granted the elections have just happened, but if you start work on next year’s campaign now you should be able to think of a good pun to plaster across some bedsheets. Either that or you can look into staging a military coup.

Learn to play an instrument

Have you ever been to the Old Bar for a Sunday set? It’s full of good-looking hippies with acoustic guitars – after all, it’s easy to Google a couple of tabs for John Mayer covers.

Once you’ve locked them down, you can just spend the rest of your life bouncing back and forth between the open mic nights at the Hyde Park and Brudenell social clubs.

If tunefulness isn’t your strong point, there’s nothing to fear. Just find a tamborine or a triangle and shamelessly tack onto a student band who are actually good, like the criminally underrated Budget Brothers.

Do a Master’s

You’ve been doing this shit for three or four years already, so what’s the harm in a couple more.

Most of the time you get paid to do one, although the smug self-satisfaction that you get when you tell people that you’re doing a Master’s is presumably enough of a reward anyway.

And just think – if you stretch to a PhD you’ll be able to choose ‘Dr.’ in the drop-down address box when you order stuff online, which is pretty sweet. If any doctor says that’s not the reason they became one, they’re probably lying.

Join RAG

If there was ever a good reason to treat yourself to a holiday with a bunch of likeminded Leeds peeps with too much time on their hands, then raising money for charity is it.

This summer they’re doing a hitchhike to Croatia, which sounds somewhat more inviting than applying for a graduate job.

It’ll be just like being at Leeds, but without the constant fear of frostbite.

Make friends with freshers

Probably the most torturous option, but those noisy little imps have a whole three years ahead of them – that’s three whole years of unwarranted trips back to the most glorious city in the North.

Go about befriending them by hanging around James Baillie with plastic cider bottles taped to your hands, or by eating lunch in The Refectory alone every day until one of them finally takes pity on you.

It’s not weird if you convince yourself that you’re the cool older friend in the group, rather than the awkward fourth-year who had to move back to halls because no-one wanted to live with them.

Become a promoter

More or less the same as the one above, but in this situation you’re buying their friendship with £1 entry wristbands.

The promoter lifestyle is perfect for the reluctant graduate; an excuse to spend another good few years pretending you’re still at uni by continuing to drink heavily with people much younger than you. It’s not creepy if it’s your job, right?

On the plus side you’ll always have free entry. On the minus side, you’ll have to shave the sides of your head and throw out all your non V-neck T-shirts.

Fail your finals

It’s not too late to crash out in devastating fashion, and what better way is there to convince your parents that you need to go back and start your degree all over again.

Begin by refusing to do any work whatsoever for your final exams, and build upon that by fessing up to your tutors that you plagiarised a couple of essays in second year. That ought to do it.

Let’s be honest, your Philosophy degree was never going to be much help in getting you a job anyway – best to go back and do something serious. Like English.

Flat-out refuse

Most Hyde Park residents look like squatters anyway, so you’ll probably get by quite easily in the crawl space of your basement or on a sofa in someone’s front garden.

After all, it’s better than the real world.