University is not the best time of your life, it’s just the easiest

“First year is beer year. Third year is fear year. But second year is spear year. Boys, it’s going to be fuckageddon. Porn sex on tap. I’ve got a sex engine and it runs on cum.”

JP says this in Fresh Meat, and it kind of rings some truth.

That’s what everyone tells you right? That your time at university will be the best time of your life. This is a lie. It might be fun, sure. But the best? That’s a bit hyperbolic. If people truly believe that life does not get any better than their three years drinking White Strike in fancy dress then their lives are, well, pretty shit. Take it from someone who spent some time in the working world before coming to uni, slaving away in the high-pressured environment of a professional kitchen: there are better things out there.

#legend

You spend the first year going out lots, but of course you do, you’ve only just recently been allowed to drink alcohol so why wouldn’t you go out every night? Before uni, your experiences with alcohol and nights out were pretty bleak. Starting off stealing your dad’s alcohol and drinking it in a cold, damp park. Then came the house parties where you would get pissed off the booze you got a tramp to buy for you before fingering someone in your mate’s parents’ bedroom while they were away for the weekend.

Now you’re at uni, you can go out to pubs and clubs, safe in the knowledge that you will never get refused entry because your ID is fake or belongs to your older brother. But lets be honest, students go to student nights, also known as cheap booze, shit music and tragic fancy dress. The bars aren’t good, the clubs are even worse, and with all those alcopops how have you not got type two diabetes? A night out consists of pre-drinking on three for £10 wine and a frozen pizza before ‘splashing out’ on a cab into town to reach the dive of a club before 11 to save having to pay £3 entry.

You live in near squalor and chances of you turning on the heating is about as likely as getting a job after uni. This is probably the reason why most of you spend the majority of your days lying in bed mainlining Netflix and not go to lectures. Going out for a dinner means Nandos at a push, but that’s being decadent.

Now if you do not think your life will get any better than this, well I stand corrected. University could certainly be greatest time of your life, but if, like me, you have aspirations further than Carlsberg at the student union before dressing up as cops and robbers and embarking on another sports social, uni isn’t that great.

Your final year is spent in the library, not actually doing any work but mainly meeting up with your mates for a coffee and moaning about how much work you have to do. If you spent half the amount of time you did moaning as you did on your dissertation, you would have had it done by January. It’s only ten thousand words, you’re not writing a fucking Harry Potter series.

However, there are some good aspects to university, mainly how bloody easy it is. How does anyone fail? You can lie in bed all week, get pissed off a concoction of vodka and rosé before spending 24 hours in the library writing 6,000 words and ending up with a 2:1.

Life couldn’t get much easier. You have zero obligations, ok granted you’re meant to turn up to seminars, but unless you do History of Art, this doesn’t count towards your degree.

Don’t get me wrong; you have a good bunch of friends, who are infinitely better than your hometown friends who were only chosen out of geographical ease. You can see them all the time, because nobody really has much to do, except Medics but hey they don’t have much to look forward to do they now? (Too soon…?) Chances are you all live on the same road, not quite the same when you move to London and your friends are literally hours away on the other side of zone five.

I’m not here saying university is shit I am merely saying its not the best time of your life. On the other hand, with a lack of career prospects because every single fucker has a degree, maybe uni is the best time you will ever have. It will probably beat living in Slough working in recruitment before marrying a slightly overweight unattractive woman and slowly painfully getting old and dying. Either that or one way flights to Switzerland are pretty cheap.