Overdrawn and overwhelmed: surviving Warwick without the trust fund

I still remember the first day I met someone filthy rich.

It was the first term of my first year at Warwick, and I was talking to some new friends in the kitchen in the flat below mine.

And then in he walked.

The smell of his expensive cologne slapped me in my state-school-educated face. His jeans were scuffed and baggy – you could tell it wasn’t from actual wear but rather from the hands of minimum-wage workers in a factory for a designer brand. He sauntered into the kitchen whilst on the phone to his equally loaded friend:

‘Nah, I’ll be there, bro. I haven’t been there in a while. I’m ridiculously broke though, haha, but I’ll be there.’

His accent was impossible to pin down – a conglomeration of multiple European inflections, which, combined with his slight golden tan, told me he was well-travelled and cultured.

And if that wasn’t enough to make me envy him, I had heard through the grapevine that he had some of the highest grades in his course. To me, this guy was everything that was completely out of reach for me. He was a regular rave attendee, a constant traveller, well-versed in film culture and friends with more people than I’d met in the span of my life. Every time he’d tell me an anecdote the same question would circle around my brain: how did he have the time to do it all?

Flash-forward a year ahead – it’s 4am, and I just got home from my job bartending at the local club. Spilt Jägerbombs have dampened the ends of my hair, and at least three assignment deadlines are looming over me. I enter the kitchen, and I see him again – head in hands in front of his laptop. He looks up at me:

‘How the hell do I write a CV?’

As he swivels his laptop around, the screen shows me his work so far – his name underlined. That’s when the truth hit me like a ton of bricks, and I finally got the answer to my question: this guy had never worked a day in his life.

I would like to admit now that this anonymous guy I have been describing doesn’t exist. Well, that’s not the truth entirely. I have heard and experienced all of the things that I described, during my time here at Warwick –not at the hands of one person, but multiple.

Being thrust from a small town in the Midlands to an environment that includes extremely sheltered, private-school-bred twenty-something-year-olds has been one of the most disconcerting experiences of my life

My intention here is not to insult or demean these people. And it is true that my feelings of discontent towards them stem from envy – the envy of being able to make the most out of university life without the debilitating stress of barely having enough money for groceries each week.

This is not to say that every person I have met here who happens to come from a rich background has made me feel this way. I have been lucky enough to meet many people from relatively privileged backgrounds who have never made me feel less for not being from one myself. These experiences are not representative of a group as a whole.

That being said, I believe that being thrust from a small town in the Midlands to an environment that includes extremely sheltered, private-school-bred twenty-something-year-olds has been one of the most disconcerting experiences of my life. It took me a while to learn how to navigate this new world, full of the rich pretending to be poor, and to stop feeling bad about not going on a ski trip three times a year. So, I decided to leave a few words of advice for those students at Warwick, who may find themselves having similar experiences and feelings to me.

1. Take ‘I’m so broke’ with a pinch of salt.

Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t going to be people that you meet here who will, genuinely and truly, be ‘broke’. After all, university fees and the cost of living are both ridiculously high, and the maintenance loan allowances are unreasonably low. But if this self-declaration of poverty is followed by an Amazon-ordered, £2000 blender with fifty different settings for their morning smoothies, it wouldn’t be immoral of you to suspect them of lying.

It is often the people that make fun of you the most for deciding not to drink until you can’t see straight every night, that don’t need to sacrifice a part of their grocery budget to afford the drinks

It’s unexplained why some people do this. Maybe it’s to seem relatable to others, or perhaps it works better with their whole ‘up-and-coming, self-made DJ’ persona.

But no matter the reasoning behind it, this lie can seem like a slap in the face to those of us who can’t just run to our parents for an extra £1000 whenever we need it.

2. Don’t feel the need to keep up with them.

No, you’re not boring for not going out five nights in a row. Importantly, it is often the people that make fun of you the most for deciding not to drink until you can’t see straight every night, that don’t need to sacrifice a part of their grocery budget to afford the drinks.

I can assure you that going out every night of the week is not as fun as it seems – as someone who has fallen victim to that peer pressure before.

It’s also completely fine if you can’t make it to each bi-weekly ski trip in France. Your nights out or trips abroad may not be as frequent or look quite as glamorous as your rich counterparts’, and this can make you feel as if you’re missing out, but I promise you that they are not always having as much fun as they may make it seem on social media.

I think this because I’ve found that sometimes the cheapest evenings, like splitting a bottle of Aldi wine whilst people-watching out of the window, have been far more memorable than those nights out at Neon, where I’d be left afraid to check my bank account the next morning. And then, when you do splash out now and then, it will be even more worthwhile.

There’s no shame in having a different university experience to those around you; these three years are yours, and yours alone, to shape and colour as you wish.

3. Never, ever, compare your progress to theirs.

Maybe you overheard your classmate saying she secured an interview for a position at Goldman Sachs. This leaves you frantic – you haven’t even started applying for grad roles yet, and someone the same age and year as you has secured an offer at one of the biggest firms in the world. But what this classmate may have conveniently left out in her tale is that the person leading the interview will be her father. In fact, he was the one who chose her CV out of hundreds of applicants, because it proved ‘strong’ and ‘remarkable’ – no other reason.

Maybe this imaginary example is a bit exaggerated, but it would be naïve to deny that those with richer families tend to have relatives with connections to important firms, companies and people. In a way, they are born with an advantage.

This is not to undermine their success in securing these opportunities. It takes effort to run a race. But be very hesitant to believe that everyone starts in the same place.

Life has never been about ticking off a list of set goals by a certain age. There is no bomb planted in your body that will explode if you’re not in a successful career line by the age of twenty-five

For those of us who don’t have the safety net of generational wealth, our university years will be full of part-time work at minimum wage jobs, endless budgeting and sleepless nights catching up on assignments. We put in so much time and energy just to survive that we barely have any left for other things such as applications for grad roles or sharpening our other skills. And then, on top of it all, we compare ourselves to those who haven’t been running at full speed, just to survive, ever since leaving their homes.

What I’ve taken away from almost three years of feeling like this is that we all achieve things at different times based on our circumstances, and there is no shame in that. Life has never been about ticking off a list of set goals by a certain age. There is no bomb planted in your body that will explode if you’re not in a successful career line by the age of twenty-five.

Although it can be extremely hard not to compare yourself with those around you, remember that not everyone was given the same opportunities and circumstances in this rat race of life.

Nowadays, too much importance is placed on the names of jobs and companies and not enough on the strength it takes to study for a degree whilst having to fend for yourself. You may think that no one sees how far you have come just because you don’t have achievements on LinkedIn to show for it, but I can assure you that people around you quietly admire you for your willpower. And there is no reason why, in the future, you shouldn’t find yourself in a similar position to your more affluent counterparts, even if it may take more time.

No matter how the rich-kid culture of this university might make you feel, you are just as capable as those who were born with a diamond-encrusted spoon in their mouths.