Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind
What to Expect When Starting University
A number of friends heading to Uni next year have been asking for advice, so I wrote this in response. It is not meant to be comprehensive, but contains what I consider to be some worthwhile suggestions. YMMV.
Before I came to University I, like pretty much all people about to make the same transition, was offered advice from various people about the nature of Uni life — everything from food to drink, drugs, sex and so on. We’re told that Uni is an experience shared by all first years; that everyone else is in the same boat etc., but having been here a term and a bit I thought I’d attempt to dispense some advice of my own that didn’t come up in the pre-game pep talks I had. Everyone’s experience varies — I speak from an English A-level student POV — but I’m sure someone will find some relevance in this somewhere.
1. Levels of promiscuity are, by and large, grossly exaggerated. I may not be top of the tree of social movers and shakers, but I’m certainly above most of the pond life you can find around here, and I can tell you it’s not what it’s hyped up to be. Granted, I am in the “quiet” halls of one of the country’s most respectable institutions, but so far the action has been decidedly sub-par. So if you’re feeling desperately starved of pootang, don’t be despondent — chances are you’re not alone (just take a look in the common room of your Computer Science department, if present).
2. Fiscal mismanagement is not assured. Everybody sounds off about the dangers of debt and the horrors of student overdrafts, frittering away your money etc. etc. In truth, unless you are a complete trend whore with a compulsion for irrational spending, chances are you’ll be just fine. The people that make a song and dance about their frequent shopping sprees in the first few weeks of Term 1 are, surprise surprise, the ones who you find whining about having no money around week 5. Curtail those £200 shopping trips for more shit you don’t need, work out exactly how much you can afford to spend each week and keep track of it. There will be a few blurry mornings where you can’t remember how many trips you made to the cash machine the night before, so check your statements. Online banking comes in invaluable for this.
3. Be prepared to accept your achievements may equal shit. Yes, Uni is all about promoting individualism and a sense of self-worth, but no matter how well you think you may have done in whatever, you’ll always find someone who travelled extensively, lived in four different countries, spoke five languages and became a ski instructor in the time it took you to get your driving license. I thought I was pretty well-travelled and well-cultured, and I’ve been left gawping by some of the people here. You’ll probably be able to beat them on something, but for the time being allow your sense of accomplishment to be taken down a few notches. This is especially true for English students — see next point.
4. If you’re English, be prepared to take some shit about the A-level system. Especially true for high-ranking Universities — you’ll find that just about everyone else did the International Baccalaureate (IB) and they’ll all delight in telling you how much more work they had to do than you (and they’ll also never tire of comparing scores with each other like they were penis sizes).
5. If you haven’t lived in boarding school, be prepared to start having to carry yourself. You may have been warned about this and it’s true — you have to get your own shit together yourself, and fast. For the most part, if you don’t turn up to lectures or seminars, nobody will give a shit; if you don’t cook you won’t eat; and if you don’t do your laundry you won’t have clean stuff to wear. You have to make the effort — sure, you can survive on box food, but ultimately it’s cheaper, healthier and more rewarding to learn to cook occasionally rather than stuffing your system with crap (and you’re far less likely to end up a fat bastard). On the whole, those that eat badly are those that can’t be fucked to do things properly — get off your asses. It’s a much better gesture to invite a girl (or guy) over to your flat for dinner and cook and serve it yourself than to toss her a couple of bags of Cheetos and a can of Coke and be surprised when she doesn’t want to eat your face.
Get a decent alarm clock and get into a morning routine. Mornings have been one of the hardest parts of daily life for me (and not just now, for a long time), so follow the basics — don’t drink too much when you know you have a lecture at 9 the next morning (you may think you’ll be okay but trust me, it hurts, and it’s hard to learn when you feel like you’ve been run over); get enough sleep; get up in time to be decently washed and fed before you have to head out; and get some decent coffee. If you don’t drink coffee, start. Another top tip is to locate your alarm clock some distance from your bed/hammock so that you have to actually get up to turn it off. The urge to return to bed will be strong, but you must fight it, goddammit! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve overslept of a morning because I silenced the alarm, thought “I’ll be alright here for a couple of minutes,” and promptly fell asleep again, waking up two hours later thinking it was five minutes.
6. Not quite running out of ideas, but abandoning any sense of order to this: get out and meet people as soon as possible, especially your neighbours. This again is often said, but I cannot emphasise it enough. 90% of the people I now know here, I met in the first week or two. People form groups of friends very early on so it is vital that you get in there quick. Get to know your hall-/flat-mates ASAP — you’ll probably end up living with them the following year. If you stay in your room you’ll get left behind pretty soon. You will find people with tastes and interests similar to yours, be it Bach or BDSM.
Hopefully that will give some something to chew on; I may well add more as I think of it. Enjoy. 
Student Night is Evil, Part II
To conclude the tale of woe: I went for an x-ray and it turns out I did indeed end up with a fracture :-P. So much for my nineteen-year record. The fifth (little toe) metatarsal is fractured towards the back, from the force of the tendon yanking apparently. Six days on and I can pretty much walk normally on it, but it still hurts. Mmm, painkillers.
So last night was Student Night at Varsity, a pub/bar just down the road from here, the upshot of which is that entry is a mere £1, with a selection of 20-some drinks costing only £1 apiece too. It beats the hell out of their “Student Night” offers of last term, so we tend to head along. Last night was no exception; I was feeling rough, and concluded that the best way to solve this was to drink lots. Gotta love my thinking.
So we have dinner, knock back a couple of glasses of red, then I break out the death juice that was given to me before I came up for this term — mainly to get it out of our house, I think. This stuff had been sitting in my parents’ drinks cupboard for some time — ten to fifteen years allegedly — and has no labelling other than “KOUM QUAT — Corfu Liqueur” on the outside. It’s orange, and it tastes like a mix of cointreau and cough medicine. The Cypriot member of our flat informs us that he has heard of the stuff, and that apparently people have turned blind from drinking too much of it. We grin. We all do a shot of this, chased with the last of the red wine, and then decide our dress code for the night is going to be shirts, ties and hats. We head out.
We arrive and enter. The place is rammed; we fight to get to the bar. We glance at the £1 drinks menu and spontaneously order shots, three each — JD, Malibu and vodka — with bottle beers and J2O to follow. The barmaid looks worried. We grin. We get a table outside and arrange the shots. Toasts are made, shots are downed. Vodka goes first, followed by Malibu, followed by JD. Wince, grin, wince. Chase with beer/J2O. We start singing. Random people at neighbouring tables join in sporadically. We are loved.
At some point later we head back inside for refuelling. Jendrik and I get chatting to the barmaid, who accused us on an earlier visit of having “the gayest conversation I have ever heard” when she caught us talking about hair. I tell her we need more drinks; for some reason I choose Aftershock. She picks green for me and dark blue/purple for Jendrik. We down them and I realise where the name comes from. I glare at her. We order seconds.
At some point we all traverse the bar and end up on the far side, where a few of the games machines are. I have fun pushing bottles off the tops of the machines. We get talking to girls of various nationalities, including French, Spanish and Italian. I fail to keep track of which is which and have to be corrected in my choice of language several times. At some point two more Aftershocks are consumed, one of which I snaffled off the bar thinking it was the one I ordered. Someone rings me — I forget who (just one of several phone interactions that I can’t remember from that evening) — and I go outside to talk to them. When I come back, the group has moved back to the other side of the bar, and Absinthe is being ordered. Josh orders five shots, the barmaid does a double take, and asks him if he is going to drink them all himself. The shots are distributed, sugar added, and we down them. I’d love to say that it was the most wonderful spirit I’ve ever tasted, but sadly I really can’t remember anything about it, except that the sugar in the bottom was nice.
Not long after that, me and Josh make a spontaneous, unspoken decision to leave, and do so. He is shit-housed; we stagger back towards our flat. He wanders into the road; I retrieve him from the road. He lays down on the pavement; I retrieve him from the pavement. We move closer to the flat. Off the main road, just before the security gates on the road to our flat, for some unexplained reason he breaks into a run, and I follow. I make it three steps before my coordination fails and I misstep, and land hard on the outside edge of my left foot. It twists; searing pain. I stagger around before realization sets in that something is badly wrong, and I sit down on the edge of the pavement. I lay back and say bad words. People walk past and give me funny looks. Josh is some way up ahead and I shout at him. I get up and start to walk towards him, and realise that every time I step on my left foot, it really hurts. I convince him that he needs to go round and open the window of our ground-floor kitchen, so that I can climb in rather than walk all the way round. Somehow I climb in through the window. I get into my room, throw my clothes around, and get into bed, clear in my mind that everything will be alright after some sleep.
This morning my alarm wakes me up at 8.00 (amazingly I had managed to set it), but I put it on snooze. It goes off again fifteen minutes later and I turn it off, telling myself that I won’t fall back asleep. This never works. I wake up again at 9.30. Forgetting that my lecture started at 9.00, I start to get out of bed, remembering something about a strange dream where I fucked up my left foot. I start to stand up and, surprise surprise, my left foot is fucked. I swear gently. Hopping across my room (and noticing the appearance of five shot glasses on my desk), I open the door and painfully shuffle down to Josh’s door, where I make lots of noise until I hear movement inside. He emerges; foul stenches waft from his room. He informs me that he has covered some of his room and some of himself in vomit. He shows me a patch at his elbow to confirm this. I weigh up the choices — go to my lectures (solid until 2pm) and then to the health centre, or miss the lectures (vital to my continued success on the course) and go to the health centre immediately. Guess which choice made more sense at the time.
Half an hour later, I have hobbled to my three-hour lab session, only 20 minutes late, using an umbrella as a walking stick. I am not happy. 2pm eventually rolls around, and I hobble over to the health centre. I explain my injury. As I don’t have a cough or a cold, she is seemingly unable to help me. I am told that I cannot see anyone today, and that they are closed tomorrow, and that I should make my way to the A&E department of a hospital in Coventry. While she is telling me this, a nurse and a doctor are standing behind her, idly talking smack, either of whom could have given me five minutes. I am not happy.
I decide to get a late lunch, and then a friend with a car kindly gives me and Dave a lift into Coventry. I cannot locate the hospital I was told about in the road atlas, so we head for the Coventry and Warwickshire hospital, which looks big and promising on the map. We find ourselves in some walk-in clinic. The walls at the entrance are dominated by posters about sexual health. Me and Dave, walking in together, appear to attract strange looks. I am convinced we are in a sexual health clinic. Dave convinces me we are not.
After a 90-minute wait, I am examined by a male nurse. He pokes and prods, paying special attention to the painful spots (much to Dave’s delight), and informs me that there is a 30% chance my foot is broken, 70% that it is just a sprain. He says the only way to be sure is to have an X-ray, which they can’t do — for that I need to go to… the place I was originally told to go to by the tissue-toting health centre woman. I am not happy. This other place is a long bus ride away, and is sure to be already filling up with Friday night pissheads. I ask the nurse what the treatments are either way. He tells me that if it is just a sprain, I should put as much weight on it as possible, and it will heal in a week or so. If it is broken, I should put no weight on it at all, and it will heal in four to six weeks. I have been hobbling around all day, putting weight on it often. I am not happy. I decide to wait until the morning, and we bus home. I munch painkillers and hope that everything will be alright.
And here I am. Hoping that it will be somewhat better in the morning, otherwise it’s X-ray time, and I don’t want to soil my record of having never broken a bone. I wish someone had told me alcohol could be hazardous.