Showing posts with label university. Show all posts
Showing posts with label university. Show all posts

Friday, 24 September 2010

University: Not a Waste

Back home now.

I'm experiencing that general post-university malaise which occurs when you have to go from living with friends to living with parents because you don't fancy committing yourself to a graduate scheme with a corporate entity, wasting away and generally wishing for an early death.

I learn a disappointingly large number of life lessons from films, and if there's one thing I've learnt from films in this particular regard, it's that everyone's life is essentially dull and pointless, particularly if you work for a heartless business (and they wouldn't remain in business if they weren't largely heartless).

So right now, I'm working on a solution which allows me to keep my dignity and life-satisfaction intact whilst also providing me with enough money to live. It's going to be hugely successful. Ask me how I'm doing in 10 years (Y).

As I finish this post, I realise that I have no idea why I titled it "University: Not a Waste".

That'll be that ol' university-educated mind at work again.

Monday, 8 March 2010

Student Elections and Lessons for Tories.

In perhaps the most meaningless, tedious and underwhelming process ever conceived, student "officers" have been elected to various posts at the University, where they will perhaps decide crucial policy, will possibly represent the Union, and will probably just give inarticulate comments to the meaningless, tedious and underwhelming student press whenever a similarly dry student issue makes the front page.

Aside from the obvious advantage of culling a significant number of the bloated student population, as scores of young adults find themselves unable to expose themselves to further campaigning leap to their death from the top of the library, what is the point of this process? Well, disillusioned voter, let me enlighten you:

The answer is, of course, that they provide a lesson for nationwide political processes. Instead of spending millions on "genocidal ghoul" photoshop fiascos, power hungry megalomaniacal politicians should create little cardboard-and-sellotape signs saying "Brown: poo" and "Clegg: more strong than egg", and other signs of the same intellectual calibre as university students. I don't simply say this because of the potential goldmine of negative advertising (I reckon Lab/LibDems could rhyme "Cameron" with "moron"), but because these awful, inadequate signs which would make a drunk, illiterate hobo blush, are patently the future of politics, both at the student and national level. They provide the personal touch, they show that election nominees aren't any better than "real" people (quite the opposite, in fact), and they are useful in justifying the average (non)voter's (ir?)rational hatred of politics and politicians.

The risk is that these signs will have the same effect on national politics as they do on student politics: no one will give a solitary shit what the outcome is, and all the candidates will fade into a pointless, grey blur. But that would surely be an improvement on the current state of affairs, no?

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p.s. I'm allowed to be critical, because I voted. I may have had little idea who each of the candidates were, and I may have simply voted for them based on their hair and the literary coherence of their campaigns, but I still fulfilled my democratic duty.