My time at University is coming to an end, at least for now. Three years have gone by so unbelievably fast. It seems the case that the years go by faster and faster the older you get. I can still vividly remember our very first day and all those mini-introductory lectures that they managed to cram in for us. I still recall looking around the hall and thinking about homogenisation of the masses and how the way to do it would be whilst the unsuspecting victim is a young, naive student. All the similar haircuts and similar clothes young people share, following the next person like a sheep, all in search of what? Adulthood? Looking at the people around on that day would be enough to make you think that there could never be another youth movement. So I made a conscious decision on my first day to get involved in the town – that’s where I felt the genuine, lasting feel of both friendship and community would be. Localisation not globalisation, that has to be the way to improve this fractured society of ours. The students were likely to be pretty boring anyway, just like I was.
I’ve been pretty lucky with my time at University. I haven’t had to live in complete dives with paper peeling off the walls and mould growing everywhere and piles of rubbish stacking up like some friends have. I haven’t paid over the odds for a room either – but then again everything is over the odds when property is involved. You could say I haven’t been living like a real student and you may be right. Who wants to live in squalor like everyone else anyway? Getting pissed every night and acquiring both traffic cones and shopping trolleys on the way home. That just isn’t for me – it’s not my idea of fun. Even when I am drunk I only ride my bike slightly more dangerously; like a king on the way home. I had fun certainly, but with locals instead of students. Our idea of fun was midnight bike rides over dark fields, or rooftop barbecues, or dodging the bats at the lake. Getting out and about and around the town, that’s what we did well, whilst everyone else drank 2-for-1’s at some smelly dive. Granted, all the girls were drinking 2-for-1’s but we were interested in getting out and about around the town, not the standard, typical monotony of drinking in the town centre. Nothing heals the soul like a good, cold evening in the park eating blackberries and talking shit with a friend.
At the same time as being thankful that I haven’t lived just like every other student I also have this feeling that I may have wasted some of my time at University. I realise now, with hindsight to make it easier, that I should have met everyone, spoken to everyone, been more open and listened more than I did. I shouldn’t have kept myself to myself so much – whether it was good for my thirst for knowledge or not. I should have talked to that girl on the graphics course. I should have smoked with Gill more often. I should have claimed that abandoned filing cabinet for my small, humble office. But, when I’m on the bus and sat by a stranger and they don’t bother to talk to me it makes me feel exactly the opposite. Why try and meet everyone? Let fate take its course, if you speak then so be it; take it in your stride, see what happens. Some of them are probably pricks anyway, right? And this world is home to a shitload of people.
Back to homogenisation: once on campus there is almost no need to ever leave, except to see family back home, and most of the students didn’t leave campus during term time. Why bother? There’s a chip shop, a book shop, a supermarket, a gym, a swimming pool, patches of grass to lounge on and a room of your own. The problem with this is that it can easily become a breeding ground for single-mindedness and apathy. The circumstances are just right for it: everyone starts to eat, drink, and sleep in pretty much the same way. They unconsciously live exactly like the next person. The definition of campus is ‘a self-contained student community.’ But is the word community really even appropriate?
Something else that further backs up my theory that university actually encouraging homogenisation is the lack of culture on campus. Look at various bands’ tour schedules from twenty or thirty years back. Every other date is likely to be a Student’s Union or a hall at a Polytechnic. In three years at one campus I didn’t see a single band, or even a flyer for a gig. The Rock Society obvious wasn’t doing its job properly. I just took to putting on bands in town and not at the campus for one reason: the locals were more interested. Strangely enough students now are not flag flying radicals like our parents were but a very sterile bunch. They were a apathetic and a-political. There was no sign of campus activism whatsoever. I was surprised by the violence at Millbank. When the student elections came round no-one was interested at all, and the number of votes was significantly less than it had ever been before. The rest of the arts (which, we must remember, should have equally the same amount of bearing on culture; literature, painting, sculpture, theatre) were also distinctly lacking from campus life. All we’d get were shitty glossy colour flyers with listings of numerous drinks promotions. When I organised readings no-one at all showed up. Sometimes on campus, absorbing culture was really difficult but absorbing booze was easier than it had ever been.
Even on my course I shied away from engaging in much conversation. I kept myself to myself and tried to keep my head down in books instead of keeping myself intoxicated. Save drinking for the weekend, not just Tuesdays because the drinks are cheaper. My self-directed studious approach worked well. I’d come home, make dinner, then go back out and sit in the library with some books I wanted to read. I read Laurie Lee’s complete prose output in about a week, two or three hours every night before the library shut at 10pm. In the city 10pm may sound early, and no doubt your university had a library that was open 24 hours, but here in the real world – in the Midlands – 10pm is late for a library. I got everything done each day that I wanted to get done and as the first months rolled by my stack of crossed-off lists grew larger and larger. I was succeeding.
It was right at the very end of my three years that I actually began to associate with other students, actually began to talk to people. I found that older, ‘mature’ students made for much more interesting conversation. They’d talk of a life already lived and not a life eager to be lived like the younger students. Our generation seem so hung up on want, I suppose that it’s no different at our age anywhere in the western world. The younger students were all full of “I wish this” and “I want that” and “I will do this and that,” so much so they had nothing in the end except drive – they had little life already lived to fall back on. I made it a routine to go and sit in the restaurant for my lunch and take notes on people. It was this huge glass warehouse with a corrugated metal roof – smartened up a bit. The first time I went there I walked up to the hot food counter, ordered a plate of pasta and as the dude was dishing it up I noticed a long queue of people next to me, waiting to get a scoop of this amazing thick soup from a huge pot. I spotted the sign: “soup & roll £1.” I turned back to grab my plate and looked at the price for the pasta: £3.60!! Needless to say I didn’t make that mistake again – I bought soup ever visit after that. Being surrounded by people but actually sitting quiet and alone was still my idea of fun. No-one talked to the scruffy guy in the corner with soup on his face and notebooks laid out on the table – and why would they want to? To anyone else it probably looked like I was working. I’d watch the girls with folders under their arms walking in and out.
Then I’d get into the queue for the bus and watch all the pretty girls with bleach blonde hair and headbands jump the queue. I’d go home and muse some more on it all, on everything; the state of the world, the state of my block, the afternoon’s TV, the milk in the fridge. It was a glorious time, those last few months of university, no matter how rushed off my feet I was with dissertations and meetings and stuff. Unlike some, I work best under pressure, under the impending doom of a deadline.
University isn’t for everyone, and I don’t think it was really for me, but I choose not to yield to the game they would have liked me to play. Some people didn’t make it at all, they dropped off after two months, six months, a year or two. I feel for them as I feel for the ones who managed to complete their course. Where are those people who ditched it all now? What do they do? Are we better off for sticking through it all? Who is to say? For every single assignment brief they handed out I found a way to twist it to be something I wanted to do. I made my way through quite smoothly and managed to get my own studious leanings in too.
So that would be my advice to something thinking about going to University; make the course fit you, not the other way around.
