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.

The One Show of Literature Modules

Today I walked, in the rain, to my first lecture of term in which I was certain I would know absolutely nobody in the room. As predicted, the room was full of strangers. Well, apart from the lecturer … He tutored me for an independent essay 2 years ago. He didn’t seem to recognise me though…



Having left home in a slight hurry, I stumbled in last, with steamed up glasses, soggy jeans, and a puddle in the back of my rucksack. I did that proper slow trudge into the classroom, looking around (pointlessly) for people I might recognise or who might ask me to sit with them. But of course all the desks were full, and I don’t think everyone was quite as aware of my entrance as my mind would have me believe. In my nervous distraction I took off my coat and hoody and bag, but not my hat. I realised this about 10 minutes in, but my state of hyper-self-awareness prevented me from taking it off at such a late stage in the lecture. It stayed on for the entire session. My head got a bit hot. The shiny new classroom design (with screens everywhere and words like ‘inspire’ stenciled on the walls) made me feel a bit like I was a new girl walking into an American form room. You know those films where the ‘new kid’ walks in and the camera pans round a room of faces staring open mouthed at them. That and the fact that I was wearing glasses and carrying a rucksack…

Having spent my morning reading the some of the lecturers recommended reading, which went rather enthusiastically into all the minute details of medieval English theatre staging, and used the words ‘interestingly’, and ‘fascinating’ both repetitively and over-optimistically, I was actually rather looking forward to the module. In a slightly amused way. The academic had also interspersed his chapter with sentences along the lines of ‘But we will find the true importance of these ‘parts of tree’ rollers attached to the York wagons later.’ And ‘Another function of the wooden arches will soon be revealed’. I felt like I was reading a ‘York Mystery Cycle’ edition of the One Show. I got the impression he fancied himself a bit of a geeky detective, and actually found it a bit charming. Not enough to read it to the end. But a bit.



After I sat down, the lecturer opened his first session by saying ‘I’m not going to make the mistake of asking if this module was anyone’s first choice, as I suspect it wasn’t anybody’s. However I will say this: students who study my modules tend to do very well’. I was the only one who laughed. Luckily I don’t think anyone heard me slouching at the back. He went on to say that we were welcome to take notes if we want, but all the information’s online.



Despite my awkward start in Medieval English Drama 3, I think I’m going to enjoy taking The One Show of literature modules. I’m looking forward to discussing whether the Wakefield Cycles were performed on manual or horse-drawn wagons, and why some wagons used 6 wheels and some 8, and whether the York wagons were meant to be viewed side or head on. I haven’t yet decided whether I am excited about this for the sheer hilarity of the situation, or because, deep down, I actually find it quite interesting. It’s the same complex emotion I experience when Matt Baker segues from interviewing Maggie Smith to a segment about British cauliflower consumption. I laugh at the hilariously tenuous link, but I once it starts, I kind of want everyone to be quiet so I can learn about cauliflowers …

 

the sort of people who are interested in my module 

Back To School

Would you look at that. It’s been a WHOLE YEAR since I started my blog! Happy Birthday Blog! It’s nice to think that this little site has now kind of tracked an entire year of my life. And an exciting year at that. With this in mind, I’m going to try and update it more often, so I have more to look back on when I’m old and boring and grey.

Starting blog-year 2 off with a BANG:

It’s 9.30 on a Sunday night. I’m curled up in bed wondering whether to finish reading Henry VI, or to watch a tv programme before I go to bed. If I decide to watch something, I’ll have to choose between the new Attenborough show about the rise of vertebrates, and the documentary about giant animals with Steve Backshall…

Cosy as I am, I can’t pretend this how I imagined I would be spending the night before my first day back at university. My overriding memories from first and second year consist mainly of painting my face like various different animals, and after a few beers roaring ferociously at anyone I met. Apart from that time I dressed up as a zebra…

Today I have divided a 100 page course-pack into sections and bound each one neatly with string, eaten 1 malteasers bar and half a bag of chocolate eclairs, read and made notes on a middle English York Mystery Play, done lots of ambigious ‘computer stuff’, and decided that strumming without a plectrum definitely sounds better when playing ‘Other Side of the World’ on guitar. Oh, and I walked to the postbox. It’s at the bottom of my road.

Had I, all that time ago back in August, followed some crazy reckless abandon and refused to register to come back for my final year of uni, my day would probably have gone very differently. I would have gone to work for the seventh day of the week and run around behind a bar for 6 hours. Then, due to my living quarters being slightly cramped, probably opted to spend the evening in another pub before skipping tipsily home around 11 and setting my alarm for 7.30 to get up for job number 2 on Monday morning. It’s a slightly different lifestyle. I would have eaten less food, and spoken to more people. I would also have read less, and played less music. I would have gone further than the end of my road. Rather than walking to the postbox, I would probably have looked guiltily in passing at a pile of letters and papers yet to be written on and sorted out.

When you come home from work and turn on the tv, you don’t have a constant nagging feeling that you should be doing something else. Here, with two dissertations to write and over 40 Shakespeare texts to cover in 20 weeks, there’s always something else I could be doing. I don’t know which I prefer. They say that spending a year out is a good thing to do, because it makes you appreciate education more. I'm not sure working has made me appreciate education more, but it may have made me appreciate midday starts and student discounts more. I can’t help wondering how many of the things my lecturers say next week will strike me as impractical academic bullshit.  

That said, did you know that H.D. was sent from London to Austria and referred to Sigmund Freud in 1933 due to her increasing paranoia about the Nazis and Adolf Hitler? I found that out this week. Some of the politicians at the time might have benefited from the same condition! I can feel I’m getting my geek on already.

My first seminar is tomorrow. Having been away for a year, it’s unlikely I will know anybody in it. I also have my first meeting back at the uni newspaper tomorrow, and a trial shift in a local bar next week. Give it a month or so and hopefully I will have got myself a nice (but probably reasonably unstable) balance of the two.