Editors’ Letters: “Work hard, play hard”

“Second year is serious,” they said, “you need to start settling down.”

With this advice in hand I trotted out of my final class and proceeded to attempt my own version of “settling
down” over the summer. Of course, this involved flying to Central America, travelling halfway across the country to go to a music festival and launching myself into as many (unpaid) writing projectsas I possibly could.

The result? I was left with a bunch of mind-blowing, life-changing memories, but also a bunch of…well, nothing in my bank account. Dragging my empty savings box to the small town of Leamington Spa, it then suddenly dawned on me
that yeah, life really has started to get serious.

University is meant to be the best three years of your life; I intend to make it so.

Faced with the daunting prospect of bills, buses and hundreds of books to read a week, you’d think that I would have laid my exciting summer to rest and just got on with my degree, quietly studying and saving money at the same time.

Take two: I get myself a job working a ridiculous number of hours over Freshers Week, start a new project and join yet another new society. I just can’t help myself; I constantly have to be busy (a reason why I’m boring you all with this article), setting myself new challenges and pushing my limits as far as I possibly can go.

Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because I don’t quite know where my boundaries lie yet – if that bungee jump didn’t kill me, surely nothing can – or maybe I just want to get the most out of my uni experience.

Why should I pay £9,000 a year just to get exactly the same degree as someone a year older than me for a third of that price? Why shouldn’t I spend every penny of that student loan the government has given me, if they have the cheek to charge that sort of money in the first place?

Many say that university is meant to be the best three years of your whole life, and I intend to make it so. Even though it counts this year, that doesn’t mean that my degree has to become the be-all and end-all of my life. Fun doesn’t end after Freshers.

So I’ve taken on a clichéd yet, for me, new motto: work hard, play hard. I am taking my degree seriously.You’ll see me in the library by day. But I really can’t promise you that I’m locking myself in all night too.

Settling down? Pah. That certainly isn’t what university is for!

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Header image courtesy of: G Adventures