Every lesson you actually learn at Leeds Uni

Everyone knows the university experience is about more than education: it’s about what you’re taught when you’re not in lectures.

In Leeds you’re certainly taught a lot, even if you don’t realise it. From messy predrinks in Lupton to late night stumbles back to your fourth year Brudenell house, you’re always learning – and by the end, you’ll have learnt plenty.

These are all the lessons you’ll learn at Leeds Uni without even stepping foot in the Conference Auditorium.

Getting lost on campus doesn’t make you an idiot

This is something you’ll learn very early on, somewhere between the Ziff Building and the Worsley. Why does this corridor never end? How come I’m on the 9th floor of the Edward Boyle even though I’ve just come from outside? Where is the Liberty Building, and how do I get there from Blenheim Terrace?

All these questions and more will be left unanswered in the three years you spend frantically trying, and failing, to find your seminars on time.

After all, the Roger Stevens alone is a labyrinth

Look, it’s easy enough. You walk in on Level 8, with Lecture Theatre 20 in front of you – then you climb up in the obvious order of 23, 21, 24, 22 and 25. Got it?

Let’s just not talk about the time you had a lecture in LT09 and were found a week later by a Search & Rescue team.

Finding a seat in the library is an art

There’s a unique strategy for each one. In the Laidlaw, you get there at the exact moment of opening and bag yourself one of the swanky booths with TVs for the entire day.

In the Brotherton, you place yourself dead centre to show everyone how much of a scholar you are, and spend the rest of the day making sure you don’t cough and/or breathe.

As for the Eddy B? Obviously it’s Level 13, where all the other sexy young things in Leeds go to make eyes at each other. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Studying can be fun if it’s in the Hidden Cafe

“Seriously man,” your English Lit-studying housemate will tell you: “It’s so much better than a library cos there’s comfy seats and they literally bring your cappuccino to your table.”

They tell you their time in there is spent devouring Barthes and Descartes and Slavoj Žižek. In reality, it’s spent devouring goat’s cheese paninis and gossiping about their seminar crush as they stand waiting for one of the chewed-up sofas to become free.

There are certain spots which were made for Instagram

You don’t have to be studying a BA to know the University of Leeds was made for Instagram. With such a picnic basket of options, though, it’s best to stick to these tried and tested options:

A) The Parkinson Building, when it looks all imposing from further down Woodhouse Lane.

B) The main reading room of the Brotherton, when it’s quiet enough to look like it’s a well-kept secret.

C) The graveyard next to Henry Price, when it’s sunny enough to not look too morbid.

D) The Roger Stevens lake, for when you’ve run out of ideas.

https://www.instagram.com/p/-zN3FUC5CK/?tagged=rogerstevens

For lunch, Bakery 164 reigns supreme

Opposite will try to tempt you; Essentials will want to win you over. But for all the Pickards and Salad Boxes and farmer’s market hog roasts in the world, your heart will always remain in Bakery 164.

Popina’s is overrated

You tried, you really did. Popina’s always seemed like the place to go for a hangover cure, and everyone who lived even vaguely within the Brudenell vicinity told you it was basically a religion for second and third years.

You never wanted to tell them that you thought the mega breakfast tasted like oily cardboard, but after someone introduced you to the Greasy Pig you’ve been wrestling with the guilt of your blindingly obvious preference.

But Zulfi’s isn’t

Whether you’re in for some chicken pakora or a garlic margherita, Zulfi’s have what you need at the end of a night.

Sure, they might not offer the full gastro experience of a hoi sin duck pizza from Pitza Carno, and they may not bake scraps into your kebab if you ask nicely like the guys in Royals Fish Bar, but for reliability you know there’s nowhere else you’d ever go.

That, and they’re right outside your front door.

Sainsbury’s Local was made for hangovers

Of course, it’s the guys next door to Zulfi’s who’ve really got you covered. Many a morning after Good Life have you spent, mouth as dry as as an induction lecture, sloping to Sainsbury’s Local in your pyjamas to pick up some snack food.

In the morning you’ll try and be healthy: possibly buy a sandwich, a big bottle of Lucozade, maybe even some spinach. By your mid-afternoon second trip, it’ll be a £1 steak pie and two batons of garlic bread. By your third trip after sundown, you’ll have graduated to a litre of chocolate milk, six packs of strawberry laces for two quid and some chocolate eclairs for good measure.

The guy behind the counter who watched you fumble your change last night as you tried to buy 25g of Golden Virginia has recognised you every time, and he is not impressed.

Your choice of halls says a lot about you

Stereotypes exist for a reason, and none more so than the prestigious halls of the University of Leeds.

Central Village? You’re so used to being mothered that you literally needed an onsite Tesco.

Charles Morris? Daddy’s paying, so you want to be rubbing shoulders with likeminded blonde public school types.

Lyddon? You didn’t get into Charles Morris.

Oxley? You didn’t get into either of the above.

Henry Price? You weren’t even posh enough for Lyddon.

Devonshire? You weren’t even fun enough for Charles Morris.

James Baillie? You brought DJ decks to uni and you just couldn’t wait to show them to your new flatmates.

Leodis? You put James Baillie as your first choice and now you get mugged every time you walk home from uni.

Lupton? You’ve always wanted to know what penitentiary life was like.

The Tannery? You don’t like human contact.

Liberty Dock? HA.

You don’t actually enjoy culture as much as you thought you did

Expectations: you’d spend at least one night a week taking in a new indie at the Hyde Park Picture House, you’d get involved with at least one piece of provocative student theatre and you’d write at least a few reviews for The Gryphon.

Reality: you dragged yourself to one French film in first term and walked out halfway through, you slept through an audition to be in the chorus for the SMS version of High School Musical and the closest you’ve come to the Gryphon is wedging a copy underneath a rickety table in the Old Bar.

18 pubs in a row is no big deal

Yeah mum, everyone does it, it’s called an “Otley Run” and they say it’s a “rite of passage” but I’m a right bloody legend when I put on my cow onesie so it won’t be a problem for me.

That evening, your mates will put you in a taxi home after you pass out in The Skyrack, and you’ll wake up the next morning to the realisation that you’ve pissed yourself in your sleep.

It is possible for it to rain sideways

The weather looked positively lovely out of the window of your Ash Grove house, save for a light breeze ruffling the leaves.

Ten minutes later, you’re walking to uni through a scene from the Day After Tomorrow, wearing little more than a thin shirt and being soaked to the core by a torrential shitstorm which seems to defy the laws of physics.

It’s a bad idea to walk through the park when it’s snowing

For a week or so every year, the path which cuts diagonally through the park becomes host to Leeds’ finest spectator sports: watching idiots slipping over on the packed ice beneath their feet.

The alternative is going around the perimeter, which obviously isn’t going to happen, so you’ll commit yourself to taking tentative steps and trying not to take your feet off the floor. You will fall over at least four times in the 20 minutes it takes you to cross, but don’t worry – so will everybody else.

Call Lane is too expensive for students

You all went there for Izzy’s birthday in second year because you’d been told it was the classy thing to do and your friends in third year said they loved it. You spent the night trying to squeeze through the crowd in Neon Cactus, getting turned away from Call Lane Social and being sick in the street outside Revs.

You spent £180 and couldn’t afford to go out for the rest of the term, coming to the realisation that the only reason third years go out on Call Lane on Saturdays is because they stay in every other night of the week.

The loosest nights are always at the German Market

What starts as a begrudging “We should probably check out the German Market” will end with you dancing on sticky benches, smashing steins with 45-year-old local blokes and taking your top off onstage with the oompah band.

Seriously, I once woke up the morning after visiting the Christkindelmarkt with my front tooth missing.

The road to Leeds is paved with Greggs

In London, they say you’re never more than six feet away from a rat; in Leeds, you’re never more than six feet away from a Greggs. When you gain the inevitable Freshers’ 15, all those steak bakes and sausage rolls will shoulder at least a little of the blame.

Ice cream vans don’t only come out on sunny days

It’s 4am on a cold winter night on Cardigan Road, and you’re shivering in bed trying to sleep after an ill-judged decision to watch Insidious on your own while your housemates were out.

In the distance, the haunting jingle of an ice cream van begins to sound. The Hyde Park ice cream man is doing his deliveries – you know exactly what he’s delivering.

Hyde Park isn’t a park

That’s the area – the park is called Woodhouse Moor, you idiot. But don’t actually call it that, or people will think you’re a postgrad.

Rumours of what rugby players have done in the past will haunt you

The stories of their legendary initiations are told in hushed voices in corners of the Laidlaw and the Mission smoking area. They played in Hyde Park, naked, with a dead chicken, you heard. Someone else says the chicken was alive, but plucked; another person agrees, but says the squids they were wearing on their heads were dead.

Amid rumours of dog food baths and chunder pints and devouring live animals, you only know one story which is 100 per cent true: that some of them once did a shit on the Charles Morris lawn.

The pen really isn’t mightier than the sword

You came to Leeds Uni thinking your three A*s granted you superiority to Beckett students. As soon as the first one punches you in the face in the Warehouse smoking area, you realise they have the upper hand.

Student Execs are built and broken on cringe campaign videos

Jacob was already his halls rep by the end of first year; he’s been president of the History Society two years running, he has an important role in the NUS and he’s organised protests and petitions which have shaped LUU for the better over the course of his influential tenure at Leeds.

Lewis danced in his Speedos in the Roger Stevens fountain, though, so he’s the obvious choice for Equality & Diversity Officer.

No distance is too short for a taxi

When an Amber pretty much unanimously costs £3, who can blame you for getting one from the Union to your bed in Charles Morris.

You’ve never known walking until you’ve done it from Canal Mills

Of course, there are some distances which even a taxi takes a while to cover – and when you’re standing outside Canal Mills at 5am without one to pick you up, you realise the true cost of buying tickets to events in warehouses in the absolute arse-ends of nowhere.

You’ll have a real adventure and end up in bed gone sunrise, but not before you’ve vowed to walk next time because it was so much fun. Two Fridays later you’ll find yourself standing next to a canal in deepest Burley, frantically trying to book an Uber because you’ve managed to get lost on the way to Eats Everything.

Could be worse, though: Beaver Works is even further.

There is no better night out than the Terrace smoking area

This is a known fact. Screw the subdued predrinks before; sack off the sweaty trip to Fruity after. Everything you need on a night out can be found upon the picnic benches outside the back of the Union.

And by that, we mean every single person you’ve ever met in your entire time at uni. Seriously, how can they fit the entirety of the James Baillie Class of ’14 within 20m²?

No-one is too cool for Fruity

Remember that true Hyde Park veteran you met on your Cultural Studies elective? The one who wears itchy-looking harem pants, drinks craft beer at the Brudenell Social Club and considers High Rise too mainstream for her educated tastes?

That’s her on the Stylus dancefloor, bolting out the lyrics to Call Me Maybe with two VKs in each hand.

But you are too cool for everything

Pryzm? Haha no way mate, I’ve got tickets to “Cosmic Slop” tonight.