I’m Paying £9000 for five contact hours a week, and I’ve had enough

Before you head to university you have some presumptions. You presume it’ll be three years of hedonism and fuzzy memories that you'll one day look back on, nostalgic for the taste of Red Stripe and those patterned tapestries that every student home has hanging, dog eared and musty, in their living room.

Instead you look at TurnItIn with despair and reminisce about that period in first year when you stopped eating penne and started eating fusilli in an attempt to add some variety to your diet.

You presumed that when you moved away from home you'd meet a group of like-minded individuals who you'd connect with and allow you to shake free the years of bad haircuts and outfit choices that came with high school and college. Yet here you are, talking to guys called Johnny who wear Patagonia sweatshirts and appropriate words like "ends" and "fam".

You presumed you'd make your parents proud. In fact, you disappointed them.

The 50 representing my £50,000 of debt

Flash forward to 2018. You've stopped eating fusilli, you're back on the penne. Your student debt has increased even further and you've done nothing to quell your parents’ disappointment. So, you can imagine how pissed you'd be if this semester you had one day at uni and five contact hours a week.

Yeah, that’s right – I have five hours a week, all on one day.

Essentially, my weekend lasts six days and my week lasts one day. Now this may not sound like a bad thing, and to be fair it does have its perks. You get to sleep in most mornings, you have time to work and pick up some extra money, plus hangovers aren’t so bad when they don’t involve getting up to sit in a lecture hall, blankly staring at the wall whilst your lecturer stumbles through a PowerPoint and struggles to open a link that they clearly didn’t embed in that slide.

When you get bored with all that time off

Yet financially, when you’re already in so much debt that the people you’re most likely to keep in touch with after graduating is the Student Loans Company, one day a week is bullshit. One day a week at university, one day that starts at 9am, pauses at 12pm for a five hour break, and then resumes 5pm until 7pm. The worst thing about it is that a 5pm until 7pm lecture means you miss both Pointless and The Chase (Pointless 5-5:45, The Chase on ITV+1 6-7, if you must know the methodology).

I pay £75 an hour for lectures

Say that you pay £4500 for a semester, which consists of five hours a week for twelve weeks, that works out at £75 an hour. £75-an-hour for lecturers which, rather than knowledge and expanded horizons, imbue you with a sense of impending doom, excess handouts, and an ever-closer existential crisis.

Many students are feeling the same financial burden with recent strikes meaning lecturers and seminars have been cancelled, right in the middle of the semester. Imagine losing those five hours a week, and instead paying £9000 just to be stressed about not having any work to stress about.

When you're out and you remember how close you are to an existential breakdown

It's a (very expensive) joke

Imagine how unlucky you’d have to be to have one day at uni and it start with a 9am lecture. It goes without saying that there are worse situations you could face at university. You could’ve slept with your housemate, for instance, and be forced to live in eternal awkwardness, or you could’ve accidentally emailed your lecturer and ended it with a kiss. But five hours a week, five hours that you could use to do productive things like overthinking the downward spiral of your life post-graduation, is a joke. A really expensive joke.