4 Student Cliches Smart Mooks Will Avoid
A lot of balls is talked about the student lifestyle, especially in the first year of college or university. Avoid falling into any of these cliche traps.
1. First year students are lazy and don’t do any work… because first year doesn’t count.
Even though you only need 40% to pass your first year and get into your second year at a UK university, it’s not an excuse for you to party hard and ignore all your assignments and fail to attend lectures. Yes, do party hard but don’t forget you’re there to get a degree. You’ve just had a few months away from formal education; you’ll be out of practice when it comes to things like writing essays. First year is a fantastic opportunity to practice the essential skills you’ll need in your second and third years and re-jog your memory after the long summer months. If you use ‘oh, I only need 40% to get into my second year’ as an excuse to not do any of your work, you’ll just sink further and further into the lack of practice that summer causes and when it comes to your increasingly important second and third years, you’ll find it a lot more difficult to get back into academic routine.
Benedict Cumberbatch says so. It must be true.
Another reason not to slack off in first year is that it isn’t unheard of for employers to look at your first year results when considering whether to employ someone or not. Now, who do you think they’re going to choose: the student who took first year seriously and got a first at the end of it, or the student who, although they got a first overall, clearly didn’t take first year seriously?
2. Students can’t cook and live entirely on baked beans on toast and expensive takeaways
One day you are going to have to learn to cook by yourself. It’s inevitable. Why not learn to cook while you’re at university? Let’s be honest here, if you can only do beans on toast, you’re going to get pretty bored eventually and the price of takeaways begins to add up after a while. By learning to cook instead, you could save yourself a lot of money for more interesting things than a takeaway every night. There are other benefits in learning to cook, too. It’s healthier, you can have more choice and variety, you can impress friends with your black tea truffles, cashew nut hummus and absinthe fairy cupcakes, and it’s a skill that will last you and benefit you for life.
3. Student residences are always a mess and there’s no point giving them nice places to live because they’d ruin them anyway
Student digs like this…
Not so much like this.
Although the sad truth is that many students are untidy and fail to clean up after themselves, it doesn’t and shouldn’t apply to every student. A good reason to not be the stereotypical messy, unhygienic student is your deposit. If you spend all year refusing to clean up after yourself, there’s going to be a lot of cleaning up to do at the end of the year and the chances are that you’re not going to have the motivation to do that. You’ll end up losing you and your house/flatmates your deposit. Surely doing a bit of cleaning up as you go along so there’s not a lot to do at the end of the year is worth it to get your deposit back? It’s always good to take into account that living somewhere clean and tidy in itself is a great thing.
4. *Insert course name here* isn’t a ‘real’ course and doesn’t take as much effort or intelligence as other courses
Of all the cliches out there, this is probably the worst. It’s not acceptable to cut other fellow students down! No one’s course is less valid than your own; different courses require different strengths and abilities and what may seem pointless or less difficult to you is someone else’s dream they have to work very hard to achieve. Embrace diversity, justify your love and passion for your subject and listen to why others chose their own degree scheme. You’ll make a lot more friends that way.
