Why are you at uni if you don’t bother going to lectures?

We pay £9000 per year in tuition fees, and besides the opportunity to sit exams (try to contain your excitement) and a whopping £12 of printer credit, lectures form the bulk of our expenses.

Not attending, then, is like chucking your hard fought student loan down the toilet and pissing on it before you flush.

We all know the struggle well. A couple of dreaded times every week, you are rudely awoken by the blaring alarm on your phone. It’s 7:30 and raining. The phone’s bright screen poses an inevitable dilemma: sleep or study?

Study. Definitely Study.

Get up

Peel yourself off your mattress, roll out your door without brushing your teeth or tying your shoelaces if you must, but whatever you do, get to that lecture. It doesn’t matter whether the lecturer is the most inspiring person since Shia LaBeouf, or whether his PowerPoint makes watching paint dry seem appealing, be there anyway.

Go, because if you’re not at university for your education, what are you doing here?

If it’s for the fabled “university experience”, there are ways to have mediocre sex with half-strangers and repeatedly get drunk which don’t involve skipping lectures.

This is where you need to be

Lectures provide a framework for structuring your day, so often ruled only by Netflix. Going to lectures forces you to put on actual clothes – sweatpants still count as clothes – which means you’re more likely to do something productive afterwards.

What could be more productive than flirting? After a lecture is prime time to flirt with your fit course mates. Unless you’re a computer science student and you don’t have any. Bad Luck.

Forcing yourself to get up for a lecture is a big step to curing a hangover. Struggling out of bed and thrusting your head under a cold shower does a great deal more for your throbbing headache than wallowing in self-pity under your sheets.

Also, turning up to a lecture the morning after a mad one just underlines your street cred, plus it gives you a sense of solidarity with your fellow hungover course mates.

I’m not even saying you have to come here

If you haven’t been out, but are “too tired” to drag yourself to a 9am, then just man up. You’re probably one of those sorry creatures who has been shuttered indoors for so long you think the only source of light is your laptop screen, a beacon of distraction amidst a sea of dirty crockery, smelly clothes, empty cereal boxes.

You’ve got to learn the material for the expensive exams at some point. You might as well do it in a lecture which you’ve already paid for, rather than from a textbook a week before exams, bought at an additional cost.

Ultimately, skipping lectures is a mindset problem. It’s like eating chocolate, or breathing. Once you start, you can’t stop.

It’s a slippery slope to a 2:2.