UNI LIFE (And why it is such a laff!) By 68K [sh1st1] For all you people just starting out in Uni, I thought I would share with you my last year's experience. No doubt this will be the dossiest part of your academic career, and you will probably end up with a huge overdraft, disgusting sexual diseases and more malnutrition problems than a tramp...Below are several parts of Uni life, and how to be prepared for them! 1/. STARTING UNI. We have all been there, standing in a long queue waiting to be registered onto your course. Myself, I was waiting about 4 hours. This is one of the many opportunities to make at least a couple of friends, starting with the people in front and behind you. If the system is the same as Greenwich Uni, you can be sure that everybody in the queue are applying for the same course as you. This gives you something in common, and is a good talking point (generally!). The main subject to talk about in the first couple of weeks in Uni are what grades you got at A-level, BTEC/HND etc, and why you ended up at such a crap place as this Uni etc. Don't worry about this. If you got poor grades, you might as well make up your grades together with a good excuse as to why you chose˙this~Uni. Phrases such as "I got 3 A's, but I chose this place instead of Oxford because I heard the social life was better." should get you through better than "I got 2 N's and a U, and this was the only place that would take me." Do not worry about telling lies regarding your grades. You will find yourself telling untold amounts of people this, and they in turn will tell you their grades. After about 2 days of this, you will probably forget everything that was said to you anyway, and so lying doesn't matter! Always make sure that you have plenty of the following: a/. Passport photographs - These will be needed for meal cards, library cards, SU cards, student railcards etc etc. If you get about 50 done before you actually go to Uni, then you should be okay! b/. 2-ply soft toilet rolls, as many as you can cram in a suitcase(if you are in halls) - You can lend fellow residents these so that they havn't got to use the shiny tracing paper stuff supplied by the accomodation managment. This stuff is great for making friends with. c/. Coffee - For those late-night oil-burning session. I thought I wouldn't have any of these, but it's amazing how you can find yourself working to 4am when there is a coursework to be in the next day! d/. Pens - Not sure why, but I must have used about 30 pens last year. Buggered if I know where they all got to... Just as well I took 50 with me! 2/. HALLS OF RESIDENCE. Ahhh.. These things. They may have facilities such as a bar, squash courts, basketball courts and gyms.. They work out to be more expensive than if you were living in a house, and the managment are typically reluctant to do anything about complaints, such as getting the hall cooks to stop playing pool all day and get round to making some decent grub. The food in these places is normally quite terrible, unless you like chips. I still have memories of people biting into legs of chicken one day, and blood running out. Lovely! If you aren't fortunate to be entirely self catering, you have better get a˙BIG~box of vitamin pills in so that you don't go down with scurvy. 3/. LECTURES. What wonderful times these are. The typical lecture consists of a bloke or a women ranting on about something while the students that could be bothered to turn up scribble it down as fast as they can. This method of learning means that you exit the lecture not knowing a thing about what was said, as you was too busy writing to actually˙listen~. You will also find that, unless you can write legibly VERY quickly, you have nothing but a scrawled mess on the paper. Do not despair. If your friends bothered to turn up to the lecture (highly unlikely!), then if you collate all the written mess, then the chances of turning something out that is both readable AND relating to the course are high. Most courses have at least one lecturer that talks funny, whether it be in a foreign accent or in strange jargon. These people normally catch on to the sea of blank faces in front of them, and therefore produce nice typeset notes explaining everything. These lectures are the best, as you can muck around during the lesson, and you havn't got to write a thing. You may also find that you have a lecturer that can talk very clearly, very concisely and everybody can understand everything.... There is one drawback. The amount of notes that you need to take are astronomical. The 'ol biro never stops going. One lecturer used to have all HIS notes prepared on OverHead Projection film. He expected us to copy them all down. The typical lecture consisted of about 8 A4 sheets in 1 hour.. It would be in your best interests to do a couple of hundred press-ups every night to give your writing arm the necessary stamina required... 4/. COURSEWORKS. These are tasks that the lecturers give to you in order that you can show them that you˙are~learning the rubbish that they spout at you. These range from simple-fact finding exercises to full-blown projects. They relate to everyday life and are incredibly useful. Take for example, one of our programming courseworks last year. A shopping trolley queue simulator. We had to write a program that sorted out the shopping trolley use using a 'queue' structure, so that each trolley got an equal amount of use. What bloody good is that in real life? Yes, it might make you proficient in the use of linked-list based queue structures together with file handling in modular code, but I doubt I will ever need to write that kind of stuff ever again - unless I need to computerise a supermarket. Who gives a toss about trolley wheel rubber anyway? Now these courseworks have been specially designed so that the student has to make good use of his/her time and use the universities facilities to the full... What they don't tell you, and you will inevitably find out sooner or later, is that they can be done in one night if you put your mind to it. Good 'ol Evolution[bc1am1] made a regular habit of doing Modula-2 programs the day they were meant to be in. I don't know how he does it. Going back to this damn shopping trolley coursework, I took 2 weeks doing it because I don't like anything about Mod-2 and therefore are not very good at it (68000 assembly is a different matter however). Another mate of mine working on the same project (yes it's true, don't listen to anyone else, I˙do~have friends! :) ) took only 45 minutes... The lecturers might say that you will have to put in many weeks of intense work to complete the coursework. Don't listen to them, they are just trying to frighten you into working for once. They don't know what they are talking about. Lecturers are only there because they couldn't get a decent job in IBM or wherever.... 5/. PRESENTATIONS. You will learn to love these! You may have to do these if you are doing any degree with a (Hons) after the BSc or whatever. Generally they involve you and a few other people making total tarts of yourself in front of your lecturers and fellow students while you try and convince them that you˙do~know what you are talking about. Tip: If you are doing a computer course, you will undoubtedly have to do a talk on computer viruses. This is where you will get one of the few chances to blind your superiors with science. Viruses are quite a new thing, and the lecturers are unlikely to know too much about them. To get good marks, do this: Capture a virus from a disk, and save it as a file (many virus killers have this option). Then disassemble the file to machine code. THEN explain what the virus does (you may need a good book on machine code for this!). This never fails to impress! This proves that you have done your research and looks good in the marker's eyes! If you have to do a major presentation (for example, in a TV recording studio in your best suits in front of many bright lights - like I had to do, Grrrrrr!), then make sure you learn your lines! It is all too easy to forget what you were meant to say. Also, "Errr" sounds very bad when repeated 100 times a minute in between every other word. It sounds even worse when it is played back at you! You have been warned! 6/. GENERAL SOCIAL LIFE. Due to tight student grants, you may find yourself unable to party every night in nightclubs. Slightly more important uses for money get in the way, like being able to eat for example. Therefore there really is only one place to be seen drinking in-the Student Union Bar (cue distant cries of tortured souls). The beer tends to be cheaper (hah!-not if you are at a London Uni!) than home, and you may even be able to get a job there if you play your cards right. You could get all clever and buy in large quantities of beer-making kits, but this normally tastes terrible and you have to wait about 3 weeks for it. Getting a job seems to be one of the only ways of keeping alive if you arn't blessed with millionaire parents, apart from drug dealing (a joke - Please don't take me away Mr.Narcotics officer.). Best places to try are pubs and fast food places, there are normally plenty around near any Uni. SU's may also have a certain night of the week where they play decent music (unlikely) and sell the 'ol falling down water cheap. One of these nights twinned with infusing copious quantities of aspirin may provide a night of drunken japes and games for under a tenner. Due to the large number of students around the place, you may find yourself being introduced to a number of experience-hightening substances (you know drugs, like Hash, Cannabis, Trips, Mushrooms, Heroin, Smack, Whack, Crack, Crock, LSD, MTV, BBC, Uppers, Downers, Leather Uppers with man-made soles etc etc). You can save yourself a lot of money if you get wise and are not sad enough to give in to the temptation(NOTE:Digital Disk ST does not condone the use of wacky baccy etc). Simply sit in a room for a couple of hours with people indulging in the above substances. The fumes alone should do the trick. Of course, if you are slightly more sane, you could get drunk (you know, pissed, bolloxed, wankered, arseholed, ratted, etc.) instead, at least that is legal! ************************************************************************~ Well, I hope this guide has provided you with all the info that you'll need for a fun and profitable (not to mention dossy) year. Have fun -68K [sh1st1]. ************************************************************************