What is ‘Working Hard’?

What’s black, white, red all over and inconclusive? MY DISSERTATION

I’m sitting in a silent working area on campus. I’ve had the five disparate and red-streaked documents that currently make up my dissertation open for about 45 minutes. I am fidgeting on my swivel chair and listening to The Wonder Stuff while reading an interesting section on the Guardian website called GenerationY which focusses on graduate unemployment and money saving.

A girl sits down at the desk next to me. Naturally my eyes are immediately drawn to her computer screen instead of mine, and glancing over, I witness something extraordinary. The first window she opens is not Twitter, or Spotify or her emails. It’s not even the internet. It’s her work. Pages and pages of writing and journal articles. Five minutes at her desk and she’s in the zone. Staring at her screen, typing away. I look at her distrustfully for a couple of moments, unsure if I’m jealous or actively judging this girl for her dedication to her studies. ‘Swot’ the –rather large – section of my brain that still feels about 15 says.   

No matter how long I look at it, the red bits never go away

I sometimes wonder whether I’m hard-working or not. My flatmate used the word to describe me recently, and I was greatly taken aback. I briefly became slightly neurotic about the concept, trying to identify precisely what makes one a hard-working student. What actions of mine had led her to the conclusion that I, Siobhan haven’t-finished-a-book-all-year Palmer, am hard-working? What constitutes ‘working hard’, or ‘working hard’ enough? Hours spent in the library? Not taking a break to watch the Dancing on Ice final? What level of anti-social study is necessary to justify my position as full-time student?

I am constantly faced with two opposing angles on how ‘hard’ undergraduate study is. Many of my uni friends are experiencing high levels of stress, putting their degree (and the right classification) above anything else. And I suppose it is technically our profession. But is comparing university education with full time work really useful? Many ‘hard-working’ friends of mine seem to be living by the principle that we can have social-lives, alcohol, relationships after our course ends. I can't help worrying that that kind of outlook will leave us feeling drastically conned come summer. Isn't the world of employment where control over our own time stops?

When I leave the student bubble, go home to my job as a barmaid and explain to the locals what I’m doing with my life, I'm given the impression that uni is actually akin to ‘time off’. My chance to socialize and have fun before joining the real world. A holiday. People make jokes about daytime tv and long holidays and I laugh along and tell them my English degree consists of between 4 and 6 hours of lectures a week. But I worry about what's genuinely valued more, earning money pulling pints, or using loans to finance a degree from a Russell Group uni. My older coworkers reminisce about that time they started their dissertation the week before the deadline and spent three straight days in a pub. They never recall stress and hardship, like their degree was the pinnacle of their intellectual existence. So what am I doing right now? I’m comfortably passing my degree, but what is that? Am I working hard or having fun?

We seem to define everything in relation to some sort of absolute, like working hard is something you are, not something you do. And this absolute is generally connected to a job or the world of work. ‘The real world’ gives us a standard by which to measure how hard we are working: our earnings. The supposed logic is if you’re making £40,000 a year, you must be working hard because you have money to show for it. Maybe that’s why I seem to have no idea how ‘hard’ I’m working towards this degree. I have no direct, correlative measure of that work. I can’t be fired from study. My intelligence and ability can only really be measured against myself. And it’s blindingly obvious that just because I achieved a 2:1 in an essay does not necessarily mean I worked ‘hard enough’. It’s strange that the equivalent, that a 40k salary doesn’t automatically speak for how hard you work, is not so obvious a fact.  

There’s no objective measure for ‘hard work’, in any context. In the student environment, this makes many people neurotic and anxious, because there’s no limit on what you can or can’t be doing. No compulsory working day to fit your study into, or even an official purpose or end-point for what we might be trying to achieve. The fact that the main word attached to graduates these days seems to be ‘unemployment’ speaks to this. Returns are, despite what many people say, not always representative of effort invested. 

It’s a pervasive idea that hardworking is a state of being rather than an action, and this grates on me slightly, especially when it's attached or detached from whole sections of society, like students or bingo players. I think it’s a dangerous notion by which to measure yourself as a person. I turn off The Wonder Stuff. And turn on The Fall. I suppose the answer to whether these are the days I worked really hard or had the most fun ever can only be arrived at in retrospect.While I read about youth disengagement and how to eat on a budget, is whether I’m sufficiently justifying my 4 year stint in higher education through library hours really the biggest of my worries? I shouldn’t have to treat my degree like a full-time job. In a few months’ time, employers sure as hell won’t. 

In a few months time I'll be one of these. If I get my dissertation done and stop writing blogs.