From the archives

Welcome to university! Today is the first day of the rest of your life! Forever!

Let’s raise a toast!

To the science students: Well done for making the informed choice to study esoteric theories dreamt up by totally insane professors that may or may not ever exist!

To the arts and humanities crowd: Get back to us when you’ve worked out the secrets of life by smoking pot, daubing paint on your trousers and reading books written by hippies and alcoholics who committed suicide at the age of 35!

To the business students: Be careful about the “blowing-off-steam-at-the-weekend” you’re going to have to do for the rest of your life because your shitty office job is like living in Guantanamo Bay. Only without the sex!

University is going to be BRIIIILLIANT!!! Wait. Is it?

YEAR ONE

SOCIAL LIFE
Myth: University is a whole new start on the social ladder. You will be the coolest kid around and will somehow be able to fool the new people you meet into thinking you are not a manic depressive loner, who was ritually beaten every day of your tortured life at school and who people only spoke to when asking for help with their French homework.

Fact: You will have the exact same social status you had in school, but without people knowing about the time you loudly fanny-farted while reading out a section of Tess Of The D’Urbervilles during English Lit. Sure, this is a new start of sorts but attempting a complete personality / identity renovation is a risky business and 99 per cent of the time ends in tears, relationship difficulties and drug addiction. Wahey!

SEX LIFE
Myth: Freshers’ week is an amazingly beautiful Roman orgy. You will also get laid so often that you will need to ask God for a new set of genitals because your old ones have worn out.

Fact: Like in life, 90 per cent of the people you will meet at Freshers’ week will be absolute cretins and a bit ugly. Getting drunk is a good way to deal with this.

Be careful though. It’s in this week that you will lay the foundations for the rest of your university career so be choosy who you diddle with. Choose your friends and the people you use for sexual purposes carefully because this could drastically affect your next three years. You’ll be leaving university with a debt, on average, of £14,779, so there’s no point being labelled “Tim Who Fucks Fat Blind Birds” or being saddled with a gang of losers, STDs or worse, a baby.

ACCOMMODATION
Myth: Your student halls will be filled with cute girls, cool guys in bands and crazy dudes who have stories about swimming with crocodiles in Iceland and flying around the world strapped to the side of a plane. You will be able to hang out with these guys every night in the plush bar of your halls, where delicious drinks are so cheap the bar staff give them out for free and you will never get a hangover consisting of arches of stinging shit jetting out of your anus for six hours the next morning.

Fact: Halls of residence differ greatly depending on where you go, how early you apply, and how lucky you are. Around 75,000 undergraduates apply each year for just 25,000 places of accommodation. Undergraduates starting at Teesside this year can get good rooms from as little as £32.50 a week, whereas if you go to Imperial College in Kensington, you can pay up to £144 a week for a single room.

Cash aside, what usually happens is you end up living next door to some toff crying to Coldplay records all day and night on one side, with a bookish Asian girl on the other side who will knock on your door every evening at 8 PM with a face like a slapped arse because your creaking chair is preventing her from giving her full attention to her degree in Advanced Bio-Eco-Cosmo-Neuro-Psycho-Geographical Nanoscience with Maths.

LEARNING STUFF
Myth: The first year of university is just a repeat of A-levels. You will be able to leave your brain at home for the first eight months and pick it up a couple of days before your end of year exams start.

Fact: Unless you are doing something worthless like History Of Art or Anthropology, you’ll have to put in a good amount of work in the first year.

Sure, you can skip four or five lectures a week, and go out drinking pretty much every night until 2 AM, but if you don’t at least try to get most of the lecture notes, you’ll end up back with mummy and daddy, Jess the cat, and Oliver the gerbil a hell of a lot quicker than you think. Remember, if you are just starting uni now, you will be paying up to £3,000 a year tuition fees, so fucking up the first year will cost a lot more than you think. A good proportion of people fail their exams in year one, it’s just that nobody ever admits to it — they just disappear. Forever. Or else you hook up with them in seven years time and they have a kid with your mate’s sister you dated for three months because you were drunk all the time.

Myth: Everyone you come across at university will have tried most Class A drugs while at school, lost their anal virginity to a ladyboy while out of their mind on acid travelling across Thailand on their gap year, and will be able to roll a perfect spliff in 30 seconds flat.

Fact: Despite what people tell you, they won’t have had too many dealings with drugs. Smoking pot once after watching Trainspotting does not make you Pete Doherty. Very few people will be drug experts, despite what they profess. Be grateful though. Drug virgins can be fun. It’s cute how enthusiastic they are about the shitty cocaine they’re cutting up on the kitchen table. They’re likely to say things like: “This is fucking Class A shit” while wearing a wifebeater vest. They will make you watch the Scarface DVD twice in a row and tell you how much they love you with a really serious face.

Virgins are more preferable than broken, cynical junkies that end up crying and / or insisting you listen to Massive Attack’s Greatest Hits in the dark after trying in vain to phone the coke dealer at 6.45 AM.

YEAR TWO
Wahey, you’ve managed to make it past the first year. Woooo hoooo. Mummy and daddy are going to be so proud / relieved. But wait. Just because you’ve made it this far, doesn’t mean Year Two will be all plain sailing. It’s going to be worse.

SOCIAL LIFE
Myth: The friends you met in the first year will remain your best buddies throughout uni and will always love you.

Fact: Some people actually bemoan the fact that moving out of halls means it’s hard to keep in touch with all of your fwends from first year. Boo-fucking-hoo. What leaving halls really means is you can finally escape from the annoying dicks you have been forced to live with for the past year. YESSSSS!

Who needs those losers anyway? By the end of the first year you should have identified at least two or three people that don’t make you want to smash their heads in with a ball hammer while they sleep, so go and put the new friendships to the test by moving in with those guys instead.

Myth: Now you’re out of halls and the bedrooms that smell like somebody farted into a can of Lynx and sprayed it out again, the student union is the place to be. You will hang out there all day and meet amazing people and probably start up a groundbreaking art collective.

Fact: If your idea of fun is watching the rugby team drink themselves into a coma while listening to Eminem and Robbie Williams songs on the jukebox, then you’re in for the time of your life. If this isn’t your thing, you will need to find some other spots to hang out. Your best bet is to find a good local next to your house.

Face it. The only tangibly good thing about student unions is cheap alcohol. Big fucking whup. Most off licences sell it cheaper. The student union is for idiots and for meeting people before you go onto a better party. People who hang out at the S.U. all the time are like junkies. They are slowly committing suicide.

SEX LIFE
Myth: The nubile freshers will be lining up to fuck the experienced Year Two students.

Fact: Sure, freshers are pretty naïve when they first start at uni, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be giving it out to any old retard. Read the sex guides in The Vice Guide To Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll (Revolver) for explicit details on how to get lucky. The general idea is dress well but don’t try too hard. Also, boys, have a wank before you go out to release the tension, don’t get too wasted and then be as funny and gregarious as possible.

Also, you can only really try and fuck the freshers in Year Two. Year Three is too creepy. Wooderson from Dazed & Confused is a good guy and all, but in reality he cries himself to sleep every night over the unmistakeable, crushing emptiness that only repeated, meaningless sexual misadventures can bring.

Myth: The person you live with and also have sex with when you’re drunk is your “lover”. You’ll get married and have kids and a house in the country.

Fact: This is extreeeeeeeeemely unlikely. On the whole, having sex with your housemates is a big no-no. 99 per cent of the time this happens because you’re too lazy to find anybody else to fuck. It’s not because you really like each other. It’s also going to piss off the rest of the household and they will ostracise you for the rest of the year.

ACCOMMODATION
Myth: You will be able to find a palace five minutes walk away from your university, which will cost next to nothing to rent and be known throughout university as the No.1 Party House. Woo hoo!

Fact: Living out there in the big bad world, away from the comfort blanket of your halls, is a lot more difficult and expensive than you think. There are now more bills to pay, which means you may have to get a job if your parents won’t agree to help you. There are things to clean. There are laundries to visit. Crucially, in halls you have the internet set up for you but in your new house you have to set that shit up for yourself. You CANNOT not have broadband and WiFi in your house in this day and age. It’s like not having shoes or a toilet. This is why living with the cast of Animal House or Withnail & I is not really a good idea. They will spill beer on your laptop when they’re having a drunken wank over a Hentai DVD. Sure, it’s fine to go to their parties and whoop it up occasionally, but living day to day with alcoholics and drug addicts means your fridge will always be empty and your sofa smells of “cheese socks” and wee. Living with rich nerds who can cook and don’t reek of B.O. is the way forward. Oh yeah, cooking. Please can everybody just buy a simple cookbook or Google “healthy recipes” and not rely on eating shit like the microwave pizza in Tidbits?

LEARNING STUFF
Myth: The fun is over and you will have to knuckle down, buy a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and hang out with the cripples in the library.

Fact: Wrong! Good news is, Year Two is just like Year One but with a couple more complicated words and theories. All you need to do is kind of keep up to date with what’s going on. Find one or two friends from your course and ask them for help any time you miss a couple of lectures. They’ll be so happy to speak to a normal person, that they will help you with anything you want.

Also, don’t be under the impression that anybody apart from deaf people can actually get any work done in the library.

Dunno about you but we were never able to concentrate while two rich girls whispered to each other about MySpace while being told to be quiet by an Asian chemistry student in intervals of five minutes as a dreadlocked white Year 4 student in clown pants noisily photocopied 50,000 flyers for his psy-trance rave in a shithole that only 17 people will end up going to. This kind of environment is great for dreaming up murder fantasies but when it comes to orthogonalising matrices it can be a little distracting.

Here we should mention that there will be a few of you who will have murder fantasies on a regular basis. The important thing is to NEVER act on them. Going to prison takes ages and the food is really shitty. Believe us, we’ve been there and we really regret it.

YEAR THREE
OK, this is it. Two whole years have passed and here you are, thousands and thousands of pounds in debt, and with the rest of your life heavily depending on whether or not you fuck up this year. Now that you’ve made it this far, there’s no turning back. Good luck!

SOCIAL LIFE
Myth: You will still be able to go out and get drunk all night and cement the friendships you made in the first two years.

Fact: Sowweeee. No going out for you any more. Even if you don’t give a shit about your course, everyone else freaks out in the third year and only allows themselves one night off from their work every two weeks. This means you have nobody to party with, so you’ll just have to sit in most nights and listen to your housemates moaning and stressing about how much work they have to do.

The best way to get work done is to think about how terrible it would be if you wasted all this money by fucking up your degree. Fear is one of the best motivators. Lock yourself in your room with your headphones on while listening to instrumental music that’s about the same tempo as the speed you can type and crack on with that work. Drink sugar-free Red Bull if you’re tired. Gulping the full-sugar version 10 times a day can make your face as fat as a potato and gives girls “dinner lady arms”. The feeling you get when you’ve done your work is about a million times better than that creeping sense of unease you have when you know you’ve still got a huge pile of shit to wade through and you’re putting it off by nibbling nervously on a cold piece of cheese on toast made yesterday.

SEX LIFE
Myth: No matter how much you’ve slept around and drunkenly whored yourself, there is no way in hell you can get an STD or make a baby. It just doesn’t happen.

Fact: Unless you like having unprotected anal sex in alleyways with drug addicts covered in blood from the worst township in Johannesburg, AIDS is pretty hard to get. Chlamydia isn’t though. 10 per cent of all sexually active people have it and it’s getting higher ever year. It’s like British AIDS. If you contract it, keep quiet about it and get yourself to the doctor. It takes about two or three pills to get rid of it. No huge deal, but if you don’t get rid of it you go blind or something.

Getting preggers can be a weeeeee bit more problematic.

For some reason there is always one girl every year who gets pregnant and decides to keep it, (possibly) ruining her life forever. Having to quit in your third year of university to have a baby is one of the worst things in life that can happen to someone. You have two years of debt, no degree, no job and a lifetime’s worth of anti-depressants. Totally unawesome.

LEARNING STUFF
Myth: Your dissertation is a big deal.

Fact: If you are smart about it, you can do your dissertation in a week. Sure it’s a bit stressful, but just know what you’re doing in advance and sit down and do it. We did ours in a couple of days and got an A. Big fucking deal. Also, plagiarism is not a problem. Lecturers try to scare you with claims of Google-like programs that detect and find all references you use. Basically, if you rearrange stuff you steal from other people’s work well enough and are not stupid enough to copy out entire paragraphs, nobody will ever know / care.

Myth: You will be able to handle the stress and workload by doing the same amount of work as you did last year.

Fact: Like we mentioned above, some people go a bit mental in the third year when they realise just how much work there is to do. They either end up locking themselves away in their rooms to do work every night or completely lose interest and stay in bed all day watching Trisha and having panic attacks.

To do well in third year, you need to keep up to date with what’s going on throughout the year. Taking weeks off at a time because you’re feeling “spaced-out” is not a good idea. Also, finding out two days before your finals that you don’t understand anything you’ve covered that year is not recommended.

Myth: Doing a fourth year for the sake of it is a good idea.

Fact: Only do a master’s degree if you plan on dedicating your life to the subject you are studying. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time. Besides, you usually hate your course so much after three years, that a fourth year would make you want to hang yourself in the front room.

Myth: Your degree will be useful.

Fact: Sure, uni is fun and everything, but a good proportion of people realise in Year Three what a waste of time the whole thing has been. If you go and do some type of business or journalism degree at a shit poly, you’ve pretty much pissed away your money. So many people go to uni these days that a degree isn’t really going to be of that much use to you.

Myth: There’s a great job and a big friendly boss waiting out there with open arms for you when you finish.

Fact: No matter what those new TV adverts about student loans tell you, only 20 per cent of graduates will have a job confirmed on graduation and half of these will be a dead-end office job, which can turn you alcoholic, sexually promiscuous, interested in self-flagellation, or force you to become a massage therapist.

Expect to spend at least a year living with your parents after you graduate. You’ll be looking for a job which you were more than qualified to do three years ago, before you took your degree.

We should mention here that 96 per cent of employees don’t really care about the ins and outs of the details of your degree. They only care that you worked hard enough / were clever enough to pull off a good result.

So, blagging and cheating from start to finish is not essentially a bad thing. Just don’t get caught or admit it.

JOHN MCDONNELL & ANDY CAPPER

Tagged: alcohol, education, sex
October 13th, 2009 @ 08:58