India Doyle: The failure of the revolution

The University decided that giving us a longer Christmas holiday would be a good thing. That’s fine, and I can see that it is more convenient for foreign students who no longer have to pay for multiple flights to and from their respective homelands throughout December and January. However, one tiny problem that they failed to engage with is the fact that making students work solidly, without a break, and putting all the deadlines a week before they are meant to start revising for exams, is extremely stupid.

St Andrews is a tiny, claustrophobic town that one is only able to appreciate by escaping from it. This is what reading week was for. We could all come back after a nice week of not reading, feeling refreshed, revitalised and ready to go. Not giving us a reading week means that energy gradually dwindles, and the only people that benefit from this slow deconstruction of our mental state is the coffee shops. Perhaps this change in timetabling was sponsored by Starbucks? I don’t know. What I do know is that no human being can plough on for four months solid without a break.

That’s what everyone in the working world does! You tell me. No, no they don’t. People in the working world have weekends. St Andrews doesn’t have weekends, it has a never ending expanse of time that is supposed to be filled studying; if you’re not studying, you’re feeling guilty about it, not relaxing. I mean, I guess bankers probably don’t have weekends, but they also get paid a shit ton of money, and are complicit in signing away their lives. We don’t get any money; we just lose money buying increasingly elaborate snacks from Tesco. MOREOVER (I am simultaneously writing a dissertation that is due in a week, thank you English department for reducing the time frame to do this in by a month), bankers burn out by the time they’re thirty and retire to a remote island in the sun. That should be a warning: working all the time is not healthy.

What is more, I don’t know about any of you, but we’re in a recession and no-one wants to hire me for the Christmas period. This means, not only do I face six weeks with nothing to do, but I also face six weeks with no money. I’m 21 years old, I do not want to hang out with my parents for six weeks: I want to be an independent woman goddamnit. Having a really long Christmas holiday is a nice idea in theory, but if we have nothing to do for six weeks, we’re all going to start getting restless and eventually turn to something dire, like knitting in front of Emmerdale. After six weeks, any semblance of intelligence that we may have built up over the past semester will have disappeared and we’ll all arrive like newborns, unable to remember how to string a sentence together.

Everyone in the library looks like they’re about to kill themselves, and we still have three weeks left of term. The University did not think this revolution through at all. Thank you, St Andrews, for making my last first semester here a miserable and unrelenting slog to the end. We’re nearly there though, so stay strong students, there is beginning to be a light at the end of this incredibly long and dark tunnel.