Tab Tries: Being an ARU Student for a day

You can never have too much stash

As a child, how many times did you allow yourself to be dragged round some shitty museum, only just resisting the urge to put your petulant fist through the exhibits, on the strict understanding that your parents would buy you something from the gift shop as you left? Wouldn’t life have been so much better if you could have skipped all the standing around and just gone straight to the bendy pencils and overpriced tea-towels?

Well, whoever designed the ARU campus feels your pain.

After wrestling our way through security (walking straight in), we’d been on site for approximately five minutes before I became the proud owner of an ‘I <3 ARU’ bobble-hat, and a gloriously yellow t-shirt that will see me fending off mosquitoes and men alike. Aware that both would have to accommodate not just my body but also my sense of entitlement, I made sure to get an XL.

The convenient way to silence your boatie friends

Take your optimism elsewhere

I’ve never opened an ARU prospectus, but if the seminar I spied on through the window is anything to go by, I’m beginning to think they may offer my dream degree: ‘How to fail’. To be honest, it sounds like the only thing I’d ever pass. Or would that not be the point?

Still more uplifting than the Dean’s welcome speech

ARU is the home of haute cuisine

Never mind Pembroke with its measly Michelin star – the culinary delights to be found at ARU are well worth the walk across town. They say that uni is the place where you’ll discover yourself, but I say who cares about that crap when you can discover a pot noodle vending machine instead?

Having endured three terms of Trinity trying to pass off potato footballs as potato noisettes, I respect anyone who can just shove a pot noodle behind some glass without feeling the need to label it a biodegradable noodle vase.

The soft lighting really accentuates those curves

Reading Shakespeare in public is the intellectual equivalent of wearing your gown to Dangerspoons

At least, that’s what I’m assuming from the number of stares I attracted as I reclined on a bench in the middle of the foyer, looking like an overgrown minion in a bobble-hat, and tried to maintain a pensive expression at the same time as instructing my friend to find a camera angle which didn’t make me look as though I had three people’s allocation of chin.

Yep, the Shakespeare was definitely the problem.

Et tu, B-ARU-tus? Feel free to stab me on the UL steps for that one

Considering my day at ARU consisted mainly of spending money and eating, it was actually remarkably similar to my Cantab life.

Although, at one point, I did actually  get within five metres of a lecture hall, which was quite the novelty.