One Girl Revolution

You may know Induction Week by its more colloquial name: “Fresher’s Week”, but everyone who’s ever survived this particular university tradition knows it is really Form-Filling Week. Yes, folks, the students are back. The streets are paved with vomit. And I have to work with these people?! Oh, yes. I am a Mature Student now.

Countless trees have been felled and turned into probably non-recyclable glossy leaflets, which are thrust under your nose at every turn. Those irritating people with clipboards should take lessons from some of these kids. They stand right outside the main entrances to the buildings, move in, shout something (“Free alcohol!”, “2 for 1 drinks at the union bar!”), throw a leaflet at you and turn to their next target.

Many of the leaflets just end up in the bin. Many more end up littering the floor, spoiling ‘your’ city. The urge to throttle each and every one of the purveyors of this face-to-face spam rises.

One company – you don’t bother finding out which – has employed a girl to hand out stickers declaring “I Love Breasts!” You wonder if it would be worth moving within stickering distance to ask if she really feels good about objectifying not just herself, but her entire gender. You are ‘given’ a leaflet for one of those School Disco dress-up events; the creepiness of the sexy schoolgirl uniform hit you a long time ago when the pervs used to hang around the school railings.

Around 20% of students’ loans and grants have disappeared into the electronic ether. None of your modules of study are showing up on your student profile, and as everyone in the same boat tries to solve the problem, the computer system responsible crashes.

Half the class hasn’t even been able to make it through online enrolment. Your seminar groups will be “up on the board” by the end of the week – they hope. Until then, you don’t know where you’re going to have to be and when. You’re looking at another expensive train fare to check said board for ten minutes. And you end up with your head in your hands, weeping in despair.

One talk starts with someone from the student health team saying that you are probably going to catch swine flu. Or meningitis, which you will mistake for swine flu, then die… and it kind of goes downhill from there.

The kids don’t seem too bothered by any of it. They dress like they’ve stepped off the catwalk and jump at every chance of free alcohol (“Where’s the free lemonade for people who don’t drink alcohol?” you think irritably). For them, it’s just an extension of the system they’ve only recently left. You worry about the workload and its potential impact on your stress levels. Your back seizes up and your feet hurt.

The most important thing to remember, you tell yourself, is to work through it all one step at a time. You read every GTD article you can get your browser on. Most of it goes over your head, but the bits you manage to understand actually turn out to be kind of helpful. Your Remember the Milk list explodes with tasks. Check this, fill out this…

Then, just as soon as it all started, it’s over. You’re still missing two of your class times, and keep hitting the Refresh button on your email. There is no calm after this storm.

Welcome to university.

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