Want to get ahead at Uni? Do the washing up!
AS A class-of-1985 graduate with one child finished at university, another in his second year and a third about to apply, I picked up this book with a certain lofty scepticism.
How could it accommodate the vast gulf in needs, expectations and personalities between all those starting as Freshers this week?
Rather well, as it turns out. Lucy Tobin graduated from Oxford with a first-class degree in English, so it’s safe to assume that her university experience differed markedly from that of my young friend, Nick, who struggled to complete his social studies degree at Bournemouth.
Yet there is more common ground than you’d think. Indeed, Tobin’s money-saving tips for hard-pressed students resonate beyond university. ‘Check online for discount coupons and buy-one-get-one-free deals for meals out,’ she counsels.
Wise advice permeates her pages, although it is mixed, perhaps inevitably, with the superfluous and the plain patronising.
Do students really need to be told to ‘flush the chain’ after sneezing into a tissue and chucking it down the loo? Perhaps they do.
She’s on shakier ground when she recommends washing crockery ‘in hot soapy water’. If there were a student constitution, its first article might be to avoid the washing-up until it is piled so high that you can’t get into the kitchen.
In some ways, this is a book that might more readily win the approval of parents than their student offspring. Drugs ‘are illegal for a reason. They involve horrible risks to your mental and physical health, and make you more likely to do stupid things like run in f ront of cars or have unprotected sex’. Still, it has lots of tips from students, even if some of them are, to say the least, a little questionable. ‘ In your first year, just focus on the fun,’ says 20-year-old Tori at Surrey University. Save the slogging for later years and ‘instead of working, prioritise joining clubs, attending socials and amassing mad memories of student silliness that will make your older eyes glow nostalgically and embarrass your kids’.
Fortunately, Jamie, who is also 20 and at Nottingham, weighs i n more concisely with: ‘ Study hard and read widely. Failure is depressing.’
I suppose my own advice to my youngest child would be to navigate a path somewhere between those two extremes, but meandering rather closer to the latter.
When the time comes, of course, he won’t listen to anything I have to say. It’s worth knowing that, according to student support group Nightline, a third of new undergraduates suffer from homesickness, and almost as many worry about ‘not fitting in’.
That said, Tobin rightly warns against trying too hard to fit in. Say no to sports club initiation rites if, for instance, they involve crossing the city centre naked or drinking the vomit of other initiates.
That was forced upon my daughter’s thenboyfriend by the university rugby club, and when I expressed my horror about it in a national newspaper, the false name did not stop his new team-mates finding out.
He was made to eat the entire paper, page by page. Students, eh. Maybe we should just let them work it out for themselves.