You’ve started saying no to those nights out
It was going to happen at some point, you knew that, but it still saddens you that the casual nights out you so-very enjoyed in the first term of uni are no more. Your flatmates are planning an exciting bar crawl at your local town centre, and you have to manoeuvre yourself firmly away from their pre’s in the kitchen and into your bedroom, to get on with the assignment you so wrongly left until last minute to complete. And work aside, you just don’t have the money to fund for your nights out anymore. You’re living on pasta and tomato sauce, for goodness sake, and find it extremely intriguing as to how your pals are able to whip out a £20 note or two for themselves whenever needed.
You’re struggling to remember your hobbies
When you return home for the weekend, you find yourself simply unable to switch off from the assignment adjusting, note-taking student you’ve become since the start of uni, and what’s worse, you can’t remember what it is you actually used to enjoy before work consumed your entire life. What did you spend every evening doing, if it wasn’t tapping away at your laptop keyboard? And more importantly, what were your enjoyable hobbies? Because you’d like to enjoy them again, please.
You talk about uni on at least 200 separate occasions in one day
Your friends back home, your parents, grandparents, second-cousins, the lady on the bus… No one can escape from you when it comes to talking about your student life. Mostly, you moan about it- your shower hasn’t worked for the third night in a row, and your hair is greasy from having to inexpertly wash it in the sink. Just when you were comfortably getting on with one piece of work, your lecturer has randomly announced another assignment to be completed by the end of this week. It’s a hard life.
You’re poor
Unless you’re one of the lucky few whose parents send them a few hundred pounds to get them through each term, there’s no bigger sign that you’re fully immersed in the tragic student life than by being poor. As in, you can’t afford to buy anything. From your favourite comfort foods to essentials like loo roll (which you’ve been known to steal from public toilets on desperate occasions). You can forget about a treat-yourself shopping trip; you won’t be clothes shopping again until your year at uni ends. For now, it’s last season’s clothes and the non-perishable foods you stole from your mum’s stock at home that pretty much sum up your life. What’s even better is that you never really stop being poor even after you leave uni, and you’ll likely be in debt for the rest of your life. We love you, government.
You’ve started to think about your future
As in, more of a future than simply deciding to apply for a summer job in McDonald’s. Your life after uni requires some serious thinking, and although your official adulthood seemed like light years ago when you were still in college, suddenly, now you’re on your last step of the education ladder, things have got kind of scary. Half the time, you can’t even decide what to choose from the menu at a restaurant, so how are you supposed to know what career you want to spend the rest of your life doing? Unreasonable or not, now you’re at uni, you’ll never be far from the future-plan thoughts, which are capable of both panicking and exciting you at the same time.
- Subscribe to The Student Pocket Guide for exclusive competitions, deals, discounts, tips and advice!
- Read The Student Pocket Guide
