Uni Clichés

So, there are a lot of situations we (almost) all counter as students when it comes to studying. They might be clichés, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not true.

To begin with, explaining to all your relatives and family friends what exactly you’re studying, because they really don’t understand. In response, they most often ask what kind of job you can get. To which you reply with uuuuhm.

I was in high school when my sister started studying. She was always complaining that she spent hundreds of euros on books that she never used. And I always thought, well maybe you’re just too lazy to read them. Until I started studying and experienced it myself. Maybe, just one time, I read two pages and that was it. The cliché is true. The solution: buying summaries online. Instead of hundreds of euros, you pay a couple of euros.

Like every other student, I promised myself at the beginning of the year that I was going to do my utter best so I could get all 60 study points. My plan was to go to all my lectures and tutor groups. It lasted three weeks. Maybe less. So, I said to myself, okay, next semester is my time to shine. I failed again. I’m curious to see how I’ll do in the third semester (probably not much better).

TGIF. Time to go home. Which means travelling with a big bag of laundry and sleeping the whole weekend. But since you’ve done absolutely nothing the whole week, you have to cram a whole week of work into one weekend. But the weekend is almost the only time you see your friends from high school, so you’ve procrastinated all of your work into a Sunday night. Well done.

One of the most visited building on campus is the library. You go there with all the intention that you’re going to study very hard. Once you’ve arrived, you get a coffee, something to snack and then you find a place to study. All settled in, you start staring at your screen, watching people, ‘ouwehoeren’ with your ‘biebmaatje’. Basically, everything but studying. Conclusion: the trip to the library was useless.

And then there is THE most important one: naps. When you’re at uni, you think that you’re going to do all the work when you’re home. But once you get home, you see your bed, and think to yourself, mmmh maybe I’ll take a 30 minute nap…. And thennn it’s dinner time. So, you plan to do everything after dinner but then you’re going to bingewatch your series and  after that it’s too late to do anything.

Another possible outcome of a regular weekday is going out with your friends and saying you’re going for only one drink. But after that one drink comes another, and another, and another one. While you know you shouldn’t, because you have to get up early the next day. The next morning you will regret every single drink.

I think you all know this one. Group projects are hell. You’ve all experienced it in high school and now it’s still the same. One person who’s absent the whole project. The one who does absolutely nothing, but gives mental support. And then you have that one person who tries, but everything they write is complete shit. So that leaves you to clean up all their messes and fix the whole project. That’s obviously great of course, because it’s not like you have anything else to do with your life.

University is different from high school, because your parents can’t see your grades anymore. So, every time I got a new grade and got home, my parents were like: how the hell did you get a 4 for your math test, and every single time I wanted to change the password so they couldn’t see my grades anymore. But how things have changed. Now my parents have to ask me if I got any grades back. And when I know I failed an exam, I’ve got two options. One: I’ll tell them for six weeks straight that I haven’t got anything back yet and hope that they forget. Two: I’ll tell my parents that my exams went very well and that I’m passing (but I’m actually failing).

Another thing about leaving your house and living independently, is that your mom is worrying if your eating healthy. When you’re actually only eating pizza and ‘kapsalon’, you tell your mom that you’re cooking things like quinoa or spinach quiche (yeah like your mom is going to believe that). No, just the basic things, a delicious ‘AVG’tje’ or a ‘roerbak’.

In my point of view, a deadline is a time you have to beat by a few minutes. It is not submitting your paper three days before the deadline. It is a fine line between passing or not passing. So, you have to be an expert to do it correctly. Here’s how to do it: you procrastinate writing your paper to the last two days. The first day you write the title and then you’re proud of yourself and take a nap. The second day the stress kicks in. You start writing like a maniac with a few breaks, because you’re having a couple of mental breakdowns. The final hour arrives. You check and read your paper a few times before submitting it. Fifteen minutes before the deadline you realise you’ve made a mistake and have to fix it. Now you’ve got five minutes left to submit your paper. And here is the perfect set-up on how to submit your paper just in time (unless your laptop breaks down in those five minutes).