Since we were old enough to know what university is, popular culture has told us exactly what a university experience should be. Perhaps you expected to be dragged into a furiously competitive acapella championship like in Pitch Perfect, or maybe you saw yourself using your badass lawyer skills and extensive knowledge of perms to find a girl guilty of murdering her stepmother a la Elle Woods in Legally Blonde. There’s no denying that we were given some grossly false expectations.
However, one of the greatest movies documenting the process of starting university is Disney Pixar’s Monsters University: it does surprisingly well when it comes to accurately representing the student experience, bar the fact that they’re all monsters. We’ve decided to document just a handful of the ways in which Sully and Mike hit us with a few truth bombs about university life.
1. Flatmate issues
We’ve all been there. You rock up to your flat on day #1, full of high hopes and laden with luggage, and you meet your first flatmate. Immediately, you’re picturing them as your lifelong friend, confidant and bridesmaid at your wedding. You imagine your future selves looking back on the moment that you met fondly, laughing at how young and adorable you were.
If you’re very lucky, this might come true.
If you’re very unlucky, your flatmate may turn out to be an extremely bitter and slightly sadistic chameleon monster who will follow you around for the rest of your adult life and may or may not be partially responsible for your exile to the Himalayas. Fingers crossed on that one.
2. Hard work is the key to success
The James P. Sullivan’s of the human world have never had to try to be successful. Unlike Mike Wazowski, they were lucky enough to be born with suberb skill, and therefore they’ve been able to score the good grades without having to put in an ounce of effort. Life is relatively easy for these guys, and school has always been an absolute breeze. Until now.
This method might have worked a treat in the past, but once you hit higher education you need to put the hours in to get the grades out. Hard work pays off, folks. Whip out the highlighters, create a mean revision timetable and get to work. Go get those A’s.
3. Then again, some things just don’t work out
A savvy student knows that the key to staying on top of your work is to organise yo’self – otherwise you will definitely get kicked off the scaring program. However, sometimes you can well and truly work your socks off, and still get kicked off the scaring program.
Sometimes, we have to re-evaluate where we want to go: maybe the degree you’ve chosen just isn’t working, or it isn’t going to lead to a career that suits you as well as you’d like. It sounds cheesy, but university is all about finding out who you are and what you want, and sometimes that means making a mistake and trying again, and that is totally ok.
4. Make too much noise in the library, and somebody may kill you
Granted, you might not get thrown through the roof of the building by a giant monster librarian, but you will get some pretty dirty looks thrown your way if you dare to talk in the quiet section of the library during deadline week.
Maybe relocate that conversation to somewhere a little bit more lively. It’s so not worth the death glares, passive aggressive sniffing and eventual inevitable irritated posts on YikYak or Fitfinder.
5. You have the opportunity to make friends with people you wouldn’t have considered being friends with before
One of the greatest things about university is that the division of students into “cool kids” and “uncool kids” that existed in senior school is kind of irrelevant. People seem to be less inclined to label themselves as “nerds” or “jocks” and the like, and so you have all sorts of different people making friends with eachother.
For example, maybe you’re a short, squat, green, one-eyed, dorky monster and before going to uni you would never dream of befriending an arrogant, tall and yet oddly cuddly monster who doesn’t bring pens to lectures. But being more open minded can mean you get to create some really awesome friendships that the prejudices of high school have prevented you from making before. Cute.
Of course, Monsters University isn’t entirely true to life: it’s extremely rare for us to find huge and potentially life threatening competitions based around who is the scariest, for example, and you’re very unlikely to have to share a tiny bedroom with a huge, blue monster who sheds his fur all over your bunk while you sleep. And perhaps the biggest and most glaring difference, of course, is that no university campus can ever even begin to match the majesty of the Monsters University campus.
And also there’s the fact that the Monsters University campus is entirely fictional. But we won’t talk about that one.