Why the school holidays were better than the uni holidays

Summer holidays used to mean six weeks of completely uninterrupted fun time. Now you’re in uni, this has been upgraded to a bumper three months. You’ve made it to the end of term. You’ve had your subject ball, your sports team ball and you’ve packed up and moved home for the holidays. There’s nearly three lecture-free months, where you’re free to do whatever you want, right?

Wrong.

There are tonnes of reasons the school holidays were far better than the uni holidays ever will be

You have to work full time

In school, the closest you got to working during the summer hols was that 2000 word geography project, and maybe a Saturday job in the corner shop. At uni, your student loan got spent like it was burning a hole in your pocket. After scraping through the last days of term eating beans on toast so you could afford another jaegerbomb in Oceana, you need to spend your summer working as many hours as you physically can to get yourself out of your overdraft. The lucky few get paid internships in their degree field: the rest of us are stuck serving pints in the local wetherspoons to the year thirteens from our old schools. Holidays? What holidays?

You can’t spend time with your friends

No chance of getting this many of you together at once nowadays

The end of the school year once meant six weeks of time to spend with your mates – playing stupid games in their house, going to the cinema and, if you were lucky enough to live near one – going to the beach.

The three months of uni summer holidays are nowhere near as fun. If you’re lucky enough you managed to spend sensibly over the semester and you only have to work a couple of days a week, chances are your old mates are scattered all over the place. Steph’s staying up in York because she can’t leave her job and her boyfriend is a local, Jess lives here but is working all the hours god sends, Jordan’s jetting off to Uzbekistan for a month to check out local artwork and everyone else is so poor that meeting up for a coffee is pushing the boat out.

You’re stuck with your parents

The first few days of coming home from uni are always amazing – a fully stocked fridge, a dishwasher and tea towels which have been washed this century. You love your parents, but fast forward three weeks and you’re stood in the kitchen arguing with your mum because she wants to throw away a bag of potatoes one day over their sell-by-date. Dad wants to know why you don’t go to bed until 3am, and your little brother has more of a social life than you do.

School-aged you didn’t know what life was like without parents and rules. Ignorance is definitely bliss.

Your romantic life is non-existent

The closest you came to dating people when you were in school was being taken to the cinema and (shocking) holding hands. Drama brewed and there was plenty to talk about. All the excitement of fancying people was new and fresh.

Romantic life during the uni holidays? Non-existent.

If you finished the year in a relationship, chances are your new boyfriend/girlfriend live on the other side of the country/world. You’ve gone from living in each other’s pockets to being seriously long distance and you find yourself feeling rather sad you’re back in your lonely childhood bed.

If you finished your year single, then your options are dramatically limited. You left a city with thousands of romantic possibilities, to return to your hometown, where all that’s on offer is your ex from school. You dumped them in the first six weeks of first year after you made out with that random. It’s better to stay celibate for the next three months.

Hanging out in the Disney store when cause you had no cash was a lot cooler when you were in school

Boredom

Six weeks is the goldilocks amount of holidays. Enough time that you got a serious break, not so much that you’re bored out of your mind.

Three months? Three months is torture. You haven’t got any money, it’s rained solid for the last two weeks and you’ve watched everything you can on Netflix. You’re down to helping mum steam clean the bathroom tiles so you don’t chew your arm off just to have something to do. Your uni mates are scattered far and wide across the country and you’ve still got nine weeks twiddling your thumbs before you’re back for freshers. Hanging out in the local shopping centre isn’t quite as cool as it used to feel.

The Nightlife is terrible

When you were freshly 18, that club round the corner seemed amazing. Necking vodka and kick and dancing to music you’d never heard of was the ultimate Friday night. The sticky floor and pervy older men didn’t attract your attention.

Fast forward a few years. It’s Friday night. You’ve scraped together about £15 and all your friends are finally free at the same time. Where to go? Your options are A) That rubbish nightclub with the sticky floor you used to sneak into with your mate’s ID when you were 17, B) That cool new cocktail bar where it’s £13 a drink (plus entry) or C) That pub near your old school full of the old men that start drinking pints at 10am.

You end up in the wetherspoons you work in, hiding from people you went to school with.