Making University Worth Your While

If I had my time again…

by Harry Constant

Now that shopping centres are opening again, surely minds will be turning to universities and schools as well. When students do return to schools and universities, I imagine the temptation will be to minimise activity in clubs and societies. Whilst I wholeheartedly support taking measures to ensure the safety of students and faculty, my thoughts are drawn back to a mistake I made at university. At school, I engaged in several extra-curricular activities and clubs, which likely played a large part in my attaining a place in my first-choice university. Once I was at Oxford, all thoughts of societies and clubs went out the window. I would like to explain to you why I made that mistake, why it matters in the first place, and how you can help your children to avoid making it. 

The problem with university is that, unlike school, almost all of your time is your own. At A-level, study periods provide a break in the lessons of the day. At university, lectures are the break in your routine, and that is if you even have any that day. There is a good reason for this. Universities develop independent work and time management. However, beyond the bare minimum requirement that you do the work set for you, there is not much of a system to help students analyse and optimise their use of time. I spent half of my time working and the other half doing just about anything else but work. Knowing this, you might think I would have had time for societies and sports. Due to the pressure of university work, however, I never joined a single one. I had a near constant feeling that I did not have enough time to do my work, so I never made the time commitment to these societies. I was wrong, of course. I did have time. I ended up writing comedy, exercising regularly and socialising with my friends in the evenings, but I did it all in my own time. 

You might not see the problem yet. After all, I did most of the stuff I wanted to do. What does it matter if I was not officially part of a club? It is an issue of networking and the sort of thing that you can put on a CV to impress employers. For instance, I wrote comedy, but I did not have the opportunity to befriend anyone in The Oxford Revue, the proving ground of Rowan Atkinson, Monty Python and more. Some people treat The Oxford Revue with disdain, as if its glory days are long gone. That may or may not be true, but I might have missed the opportunity to get in the boat with the future’s next classic comedians because I did not want to pin myself down. There is also the issue of how it looks on paper. Saying that I wrote some comedy in my free time is not nearly as impressive on a CV as saying that I was a member of The Oxford Revue where I wrote and performed comedy for three years. Students can easily find out what societies are on offer: they simply need to attend the societies fair during freshers week. There they will be able to meet and sign up for any society or club that remotely interests them.

I hope your children will not labour under the same delusion as I did about what I would or would not have time for. However, if you want to take precautionary measures, it is very simple. Rather than making the odd comment encouraging participation in societies and sports, you could drive the point home that there is always more time than one might think, even whilst staring down the barrel of an essay due in a week. When I started writing, running and learning the guitar, the only things I had less time for were procrastinating and worrying about work. I am now at a slight disadvantage to those who did those exact things as part of a society for the reasons I have already explained. If I could have my time at university again, I would sign up to every club on offer. I hope that this article can help students make university worth their while. After all, it is quite expensive.