Student life; what do we actually do?

[Photo: Cat (left) @ Beacons 2014]

Being a student is fabulous: you can go out whenever you feel like it, use your overdraft to buy infinite amounts of useless rubbish, parents finally take the backseat – or so the media like to band around. But what is it really like?

For me, my days consist of endless journeys on public transport – the ‘transport blues’ I like to call it – when I find myself on a bus without headphones, having to listen to some of the rubbish that leaves people’s mouths on a cold and wet Monday morning. I’m far from perfect, obviously, but there’s a line when it comes to talking about in which club it was this weekend that I got “absolutely paralytic mate”. Moan moan moan, the list goes on. I finally get to university, and as I sit with my friends who find pleasure in working out how much money each lecture is costing us, you feel a little sick thinking about the fact that in the long run you’re spending a lot of money on a lecture you’re only half listening to.

I finished my first year of Uni in April. We’re now in September and I’ve often thought to myself, what have I actually done that’s worthwhile in the past 6 months? For starters, I’ve had an internship at ILikePress, I’ve worked the press area at Beacons festival and I’ve attained various writing opportunities and editorial roles… But I could have done so much more. My desired career is to work within the music industry (whose isn’t), but how will I achieve that? How often do you hear a student actually going into the career they studied for at university? Maybe we’re all floating, does anybody really know what path they want to take?

When I finished my first year, I felt liberated and motivated to achieve. Now? I still have the motivation and drive, but coming back for a second year when I’ve had so much freedom, I feel 6 months is a little too long to be getting back into the swing of things; listening to people read from a PowerPoint – yes, this does happen. You often wonder why you’re actually in university, when you spend quite a lot of it ‘not doing a reyt lot’. Maybe this is where students are going wrong. Or maybe I should just quit moaning and accept that this is ‘the greatest few years of my life’.

So to answer the question, what do students actually do? Well we’re all different. I guess most of us want to achieve, I mean, we’re paying for it! Others perhaps do it for the freedom and the ‘free money’. Either way we do spend quite a lot of it growing up and not doing very much until the third year – unless you have a part time job and then you don’t really have a life.

Catriona Chadderton

SEPTEMBER 2014 from Cat’s Monthly Column with TSOTA