Lies, damned lies and...

From The Guardian:

Niki Hindmarsh, a final-year journalism student, gets up at 4.30am to do a four-hour shift at a local radio station, reading the traffic and the weather report. She's back at Liverpool John Moores University for a 10am lecture, then spends the rest of the day between lectures and the library. She is also entertainment coordinator in the student union and runs the student radio station. When her mates go to the pub in the evening, she's tucked up in bed.

Oh shit, I think I'm going to be a total failure. I can imagine Niki now, her smug little face, cosy in her bedroom (pink, of course), surrounded by grotesque, over-sized cuddly Disney characters. Snuggling down to watch an episode of Dawson's Creek (just the one, mind) from her DVD box-set before enjoying a cocoa and bed by ten. She doesn't have a boyfriend, she's concentrating on her studies (code: can't get one. Seriously, why wasn't that an option in their survey? It's the most common cause of celibacy there is). She'll be an editor by the time she's 23, and I'll have to beg her for a job.

Makes you want to spit, don't it?

The student housing group Unite commissioned a poll of UK Uni students, and apparently, we're no longer a tribe of unwashed, Tricia watching alcoholics. No, we're swots, financial wizards and we chill out with our iPods. Bollocks.

Let me address a couple of these points. There are always a few naturally gifted people in any class. They come to uni becuase they were good at school, they liked it, they want more. These guys look like swots, but they're not, they just know how to do their thing, and they rarely have to work really hard to get good marks.

There are the people in the middle who are bright, certainly, but they really do have to work hard to get the great grades. Now these people, they're not swots, they're survivors. They work to save themselves, keep their heads above water. They probably do better in the real world too becuase, dammit, they want it more. I think young Niki above is one of these. Nobody used to success gets up at four in the morning to work for free. Only those that're hungry enough do.

And then you've got your scum, the people that think Uni life looks really fun based primarily on the Young Ones. They're the mental drinkers, and usually, they're gone after the first year. Thank god.

As for managing our finances - well, we have to, otherwise we'd be homeless. Personally speaking, my student loan for this semester was around £1200, and that was at the start of January. It ran out 3 weeks ago, and the next payment isn't until April 20! Thats right near the end of term! That's £1200 to last nearly 5 months. So I repeat my point - we have to be good with our finances, otherwise we're fucked.

Gadgets though, we are guilty as sin with. As my previous post said, I praise my PC above everything in my flat (apart from my girlfriend, of course... she gets upset when I love the computer more). Living in the modern world is easy if you can grasp the concept that technology is cooler than a cucumber factory.

As for me, what kind of student am I? I think I have kind of a knack for the things that I do, but one day it's going to bite me in the arse. I do love to write though, that's for sure, and that must count when you want to be a writer. Only, I'm not sure what I want to write about most of the time. I think one of the things Uni allows for is that little more time to figure out what it is you want to be. Hopefully, this time next year, I'll be closer to figuring that out for myself. At least, I'd better be.