What’s the worst thing about UoY?

There’s a lot of good stuff in York – when your friends come to visit it’s not hard to see why they’re so seethingly jealous. But there’s bad stuff too.

We thought we’d ask you, the people of UoY, what the worst thing is about our hallowed halls. Before you vote, here are the options…

Unfriendly fowl

You were smitten with the idyllic setting of a university around a man-made lake at first, and all the little goslings and ducklings you were teased with on your open day fooled you into believing your walks to lectures would be interrupted with, at worst, the gentle caw of a mother duck.

What you actually got was a feisty goose chasing you back to your halls at 3am, your feet losing traction as you waded through acres of foul fowl shit. They see you clutching a toasted sandwich from D-Bar as a free lunch and if you thought for one second you would be able to walk down the covered walkway without being molested by a rabid goose and having your nostrils assaulted by the horrible stench emanating from their home in the lake then you have another thing coming.

9am lectures

The glorious vision of a university life where you can sleep in till noon and then slope down to The Courtyard for a quick pint isn’t real. You will have to go to a compulsory class at 9am, and you WILL be hungover. As your concentration fades faster than the Kuesday stamp on your wrist you will soon realise that everything you thought about uni is a lie.

Really fit people

Everyone hates people that are fitter than them. University is bad enough without having to begin every lecture with a parade of pert bottoms, bulging biceps and York Sport Village wristbands. Nobody wants a constant reminder of their failures as they tearfully cram a KitKat Chunky Xtra into their mouth, never mind having to slum it at the campus Sports Centre in last month’s bar crawl t-shirt rather than the fluorescent Nike running tights of the posh kids who can afford the £40 membership fee.

The takeaways

We hate takeaways. Obviously we’ll eat them, and of course we’ll relentlessly petition our friends to leave a club early just to go and get one. But no, we do not like them.

The warm embrace of Efes and the welcome influx of heavy carbs to your system does little to assuage the guilt you’ll inevitably feel upon the completion of a 16” Al Pacino Special. The few sit-ups you pretend to do in the gym are quickly countered by a few 1,000 calories of self-pity. Takeaways are a haven for a veritable smorgasbord of club rejects, and you are one of them, out of choice, every single time.

Central Hall

You freeze in it during lectures, the exams you take in it you will no doubt fail and you vomit loudly upon sight of it at all other times – Central Hall is truly deserving of a place on this list. Sure, it blends well into its back drop of the lake, Vanbrugh and the permanently grey sky of anywhere North of Birmingham. You could be forgiven for thinking its striking architecture was in some way redeeming, but when you know that it achieved only seventh in a poll of the worst looking buildings in the UK, you realise it can’t even achieve a first at something bad, let alone something good.

Super keen students

Nobody likes them, and I’m pretty sure they don’t even like themselves. We all sit in lectures pretending we know what’s going on and we smile and nod as the lecturer passes as if to confirm that, but that can all so quickly be shattered as a member of the audience puts his or her hand up to correct the lecturer and we realise the notes we’ve been painstakingly not taking for the last hour are all bullshit and our lives are a lie. Worse still is when a student asks a complex questions with only five minutes left, when everyone else knows this time is meant for silent contemplation of this week’s Revs outfit and working on improving your Yakarma.

The lake

ou hate the geese that make it their home, and you hate the university for banning swimming in it. You feel that the largest plastic bottomed lake in Europe could easily be a place to relax and unwind in the summer, before you realise it’s a biohazard with the amount of shit in the bottom of it.The mornings where you can smell molasses in the air only serve to make those morning where the green mist rolling off the lake causes you to detour from the gym to the health centre even worse. The stories you hear of students braving its murky waters sound almost as rich as the lie you told yourself about the work you weren’t achieving whilst reading this.

Sweaty clubs

York has plenty of these. Everyone pretends to love them whilst ignoring the fact that you could possibly drown just by standing too near any one person. Going out to a club should be a fun social occasion, perhaps supplemented with good music and cheap drinks, but it’s not feasible to think the missing ingredient is perspiration. The only place anyone will be getting moist on a night out in York is on the crowded dancefloors of Salvation.

York St John

Nobody likes York St John, but at least they’re better than Lancaster. They will hide behind their “stunning location” or “revolutionary arts facilities”, but it will always be an ex-poly and you will always rinse their students on YikYak. Your varsity matches will be a guaranteed rout, but if you see one of their students in the club you will turn your nose up – after one too many VKs at Popworld you may start chatting to one of them, and more often than not they’ll feel obliged to inform you “I’m from YSJ, but I’m not an idiot.”

Student Media

Even as I sit here writing this I realise my own self-loathing for doing it. Nobody cares what I or any of their peers have to say. Papers are a dying media, I buy the Sun purely because I feel 60p is justification enough to look at page three with a clear conscience, much like I only read the York Vision to feel better about my life compared to some of its featured students.

Nouse is unpronounceable, Vision is shit, and don’t even get us started on Lemon Press. The Tab just comprises of the rejected articles from the three and adds pictures. The free copies of the printed student media publications are more often used to mop up sick than they are read, and the only redeeming feature of them all is the fact they’re only published once a fortnight.

Yourself

Does anybody like what they became at university? You travelled to far flung parts of the country to escape the life you had made for yourself back home, and you bought a wax coat, a blazer and some fancy trainers you and your old friends used to mock people for wearing.

You went clubbing and pretended to be interested in grime, you lied about your sexual history to equally mendacious house mates during games of “Never Have I Ever” and you invented a nickname that doesn’t fit your personality. Everyone thinks they found themselves at university but really you were happier when you were wetting your pants and mummy and daddy still made your dinner.