Sunday 29 June 2014

The secret life of students... Urgh.

http://www.channel4.com/info/press/programme-information/the-secret-life-of-students

"The three main components of university life at Leicester are partying, action and friends"

Thanks channel 4. Thanks for throwing the academic reputation of the University of Leicester into disrepute. Thanks for making university look like a drunken play pen for imbeciles. Thanks for perpetuating the misnomer that university is just three years of partying with studying being an annoyance on the side.

In my opinion, the three main components of university life at Leicester are studying hard, socialising with nice, decent people and teaching from world renowned academics. A notion of students just being into partying and fun and friends and blah blah blah raises the expectation of thousands to something truly unrealistic that will be shattered when they arrive.

I am particularly disturbed by the character by the name of "Aiden" who from his bio on this website is a lad, reinforcing a villainous stereotype that, from personal experience, makes university life not just horrible, but plain terrifying and can ruin the experience.

The sooner this can be over and done with, the better.

Oh and my biggest thanks goes to the management at the University of Leicester for allowing this to happen. Because TV shows always portray things in a positive light.

I'm hoping now that this will be surprisingly good, but I have a feeling that it won't be. Mostly because of the inherent mistrust of the media on youth culture. Any programme that shows "intelligent" young people as being morons will help aid this message that all young people are stupid and we shouldn't take them seriously.