If you’re going to do college right, you’ll need a bad influence. If you don’t have a bad influence, you need to step right up and be the bad influence.
It’s a place where not everything is supposed to go to plan. If you’re a bit Type A to begin with, that might give you hives. But as the old saying goes (probably): with every hive comes an opportunity.
Here’s our crucial college guide.
1. Have a friend who stumbles through college and makes it their business to stop you going to lectures. This is a test of your will and resilience - or a gentle reminder that the occasional bit of mitching doesn't do too much harm. Didn't mitch at school? Why not try it at college?
2. Being lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer or intersex at college is almost expected now. You can even be asexual and proud now. And it's fine - even mandatory, I understand from my sources - to play around with your gender and sexual identities; it's grand if you decide the whole gay thing isn't really for you. Don't feel obliged, just because you're LGBTIQ+, to be fun or interesting. Some of the best ones are as dull as anyone else.
3. That said, you don't even need to be LGBTQI+ in college to be interesting. You can be as pretentious or ridiculous as you like. Early on in first year, one girl arrived dressed almost entirely in tinsel. A lot of tinsel. She still wears it. Another went through a period of only speaking in Sex and the City quotes, but changed into Shakespearian language. You can care about things you'd never have time for in real life: A friend and I ran a referendum to enshrine editorial independence into the student union's newspaper, the University Observer and then, high on referenda, we had Coke banned from the college shops because of human rights abuses in Columbia. But sometimes the allowances for college eccentricities hide the fact that they hold fairly odious opinions (it's not libel as I long as I don't say he was odious, which I would never do): We met a Victorian gentleman who went on to write national newspaper columns extolling the virtues of French fascist Marine Le Pen.
4. Student politics is a strange little bubble that has no impact in the real world. To paraphrase Sayre's Law: "Student politics is the most vicious, precisely because the stakes are so small." During my time in UCD, there was some kind of "letter scandal" involving a student union official who is now a senior politician. Apparently someone saw a letter and he didn't, or something. Nobody really remembers but all 50 or so students who hung around the union were very angry and divided over the "scandal". Use your energy for societies, clubs and volunteering.
5. Gravitate towards people you like. This isn't school so your friendships don't have to be based on who sits next to you. You can really choose your friends and they can choose you; you'll find like-minded and not-so-like-minded people in the myriad clubs and societies on campus. Your friendships don't have to be based on Snapchat streaks; screw that company and its unholy hold over you. Sex is amazing with the right person, but only be with people who make you feel better about yourself, use protection and make sure it's based on enthusiastic and informed consent.
6. Gather stories on everyone you meet who you think might end up remotely famous (that's a low bar by Irish standards, so spy on everyone) and well-known and then write stories for The Irish Times which ask: "Which rich and famous Hollywood star once secretly lived in the UCD arts block for a year, sneaking in before it was locked at 10pm every night and showering down in the sports centre?" I see no reason why this famous man wouldn't be reading the Higher Options supplement, so he knows who he is. Comedians Jarlath Regan, Fred Cooke and Grainne Maguire, several journalists and writers and at least one very socialist politician: I have dirt on you too. It's all in the book. Send me free tickets or else.
7. You might be one of those ten per cent of people with a crap body clock that converts daylight to darkness and darkness to daylight, but 90 per cent of people will have passed out with delirium and exhaustion by 3am if they try to pull an all-nighter.
8. What will you do with that degree? Have you made the right choice? Doesn't really matter. Are you enjoying the challenges it poses, how it is sneakily reframing your mushy brain to research and think for itself, analysing and parsing through information and cohesively communicating its findings? If so, you have been liberated from the tyranny of the brain stem and thrown off the shackles of your pointless body. It's just a matter of time before you merge your consciousness into a machine and float freely through space while generating endless simulated universes for your own robotic pleasure. But you have to study to get into space.
9. If you're living away from home, you'll need to have or be either a total skinflint who robs your housemate's food, a total slob who assumes that the same cleaning angels who've always been there for them will show up, or a frightening, bug-eyed control freak who loses it if you leave your shoes inside the hall door instead of on the shoe rack they "brought specially". In ye olde days, a yellow post-it note slammed onto the fridge door was the passive-aggressive of communicating frustrations with housemates, but WhatsApp is the new medium for that.
