It’s coming up towards the end of my first year at university, an end which, for my tastes, has come about far too swiftly. Generally I have to say that is has gone exceedingly well, perhaps even better than I anticipated, however that is not to say that I don’t have a few regrets. The one foremost in my mind being the fact that I never really got stuck in and socialised with my coursemates.
Now I have met an array of weird and wonderful people since coming to university (some a little closer to weird than wonderful), some of them becoming great friends. When it comes to my coursemates however I am less enthused and to diagnose the problem I came up with the geek/lad ratio. For it seems on my course (Computing) that there is a 70/20 split between the two, with only 5% left for people with a healthy mix (like me or so I like to think) and the other 5% for females (5% may be a little generous as there is about 10 in the whole year). Looking at my rough, indeed very rough estimations there are certainly no surprises. Computing has always been a male-dominated career path (or sausage-fest as I have in the past so eloquently put it). But what I have an issue with is not the lack of females, it is the lack of a middle ground that irks me.
Perhaps it is too much to ask for to meet people who are happy to set up a minecraft server one night and go out and get hammered the next, perhaps I am too much of an everyman so to speak, maybe I should stick to one or the other. Don’t mistake me there are some great lads on my course but they, for the most part, seem to either want to go out everynight and do nothing else but drink and have ‘banter’ (I’ll come to that word towards the end) or do nothing of the sort. The whole thing serves to make me relieved that I have been blessed with such great flatmates, I surely would have been admitted by now otherwise.
This is more of a ramble than usual as it was an impulse post, there is a good chance that I am completely off the mark and the fault is mine rather than my coursemates but the point stands. I have a little resolution for second year and that is to make more of a concerted effort to socialise within my course as well as outside of it. I believe that, if I succeed, second year could be even better than the first.
Adantur out.
P.S. About the term ‘banter’, it is most odd how that word has come back into common usage as, when I was younger (I hate being able to say that!!) the term was very rarely used and seemed extremely outdated, perhaps something one might expect to read in English class. It seems to have coincided with the ‘lad’ culture that is prevalent at the moment and is indeed used most commonly by said ‘lads’, some people hate I have no strong opinion on it. It can be offensive, it can be just outright crude, but what else is to be expected from the vast majority of its users?
Adantur 