Before I came to Uni I had a very set idea of what a student was, and what made for a good student. I also had in my mind an idea of what a bad student was, and this was centred around the stereotypes you would hear growing up.
There are lots of stereotypes and assumptions made about students, and given that I’m nearing the end of my first year of university, I’m going to look at the validity of these claims.
The first one is the idea that students spend a huge amount of time sleeping.
As I write this, it is currently 4:36am on a Wednesday morning – this may give you an insight into how I don’t really follow this claim.
[Just as a disclaimer: the reason that I am up this late is not because I have been binge-watching the newest season of Daredevil on Netflix, or been up all night messaging someone and the chat was just so deep that we just did not notice time passing.]
I have spent most of this late night/early morning trying quite desperately to get to sleep. But after two frustrating hours of staring at the room of my flat, I cracked and turned to my best friend in the world – my laptop.
Insomnia has been a thing in my life mildly off and on for a few years. However, since coming to university – and my life turning into this bustling mess of activity – the insomnia seems to have developed into a more frequent and prominent thing.
I will get to a point at night where I know I have to sleep if I want to function as a human the following day, so all lights go off and I lie there.
But despite my body beginning to rest my brain keeps going.
I lie there, and every detail of every aspect of my life begins to swirl. And this over-active thinking will just stay there, this shouting inside my head, as I twist and turn my body into shutting down.
This seems to happen several days a week for me now, and it drives me crazy.
It then reaches the unavoidable resolution of my body finally taking charge and shutting me down; I will then go into hibernation for an insane amount of time before I wake up feeling far too awake…and the cycle repeats.
In this sense I would say I’m not particularly good at fitting into this stereotype surrounding students.
Another claim often thrown at students is that we are lazy and procrastinate far too much of our time on trivial things like Youtube, BuzzFeed and Tumblr.
This is me in a nutshell. No matter what I am meant to be doing, whether it is something I usually love to do, or something I can’t stand, the minute it becomes a thing that has to be done I can no longer summon the motivation.
I love making films, truly I do. But the minute someone sets a deadline for me, or I do set it myself, the enthusiasm I had for the project will just go ,and I will be left just with a half-written script and no plans for what comes next.
The same happens with assessments – and, in fact, this very article.
My supreme skill at scrolling down Facebook to avoid commitment to any productive activity means something that should take me 24 hours to get through, will usually take me a week of moaning before anything gets close to started.
In this sense I seem to fit rather well into this student stigma, and I know a lot of people like me.
I do realise I have spent a huge amount of this article talking about me, and my struggles (common in a lot of my articles… I’m sorry).
But I think that taking this questions of whether you would class yourself as a good bad student (being someone who ticks a lot of the boxes of things people say when accusing students of easy lives), or if you think you are a bad good student (in that you are someone who strives for an socially active as well as academically successful student life but find yourself overcome by the challenge of juggling all the aspects that make uni so very different to anything that came before.)
Despite the rambling of this article, I am still so unsure as to where I lie on the good bad or bad good scale.
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