This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Nottingham chapter.
When I was a teenager, I knew that I wanted to do English at university because it was a subject that I genuinely liked doing and it was a subject that I could do next to no revision in and come out with a good grade. Then I came to uni and the workload was heavier and the essays way longer and I (along with the rest of coursemates) sadly discovered that there was a dark side to doing an English degree. So, here are the struggles of doing English at uni.
- Sparknotes is your best friend. Seriously whoever invented it needs to be given a knighthood or something because it’s saved the lives of countless students doing English.
- “You’re doing such an easy/useless degree.” English students seem to bear the brunt the most when it comes to being told by science students that our degree is totally worthless (cough* Geography’s a Bsc degree and it involves colouring in cough*). It definitely isn’t an easy degree either because if it was we’d all be walking out with a first without even trying right?
- “Books, books, books galore.” The vast majority of your bank balance goes towards buying a different book every week because as we all know, nothing screams being unprepared as you walk into a seminar without a copy of the text you’re doing.
- Scrabble gets incredibly competitive. Almost like Monopoly in terms of bringing out everyone’s dark side but not quite.
- Referencing gives you a bigger headache than a hangover after a multiple day bender. This one’s something anyone who does an essay subject can relate to but need I say more?
- The desperation to get your word count up gets real. You start rephrasing and adding onto sentences in ways you never thought you could.
- “But you don’t look like someone who does English!” Me and few of my Asian friends have had this one but to this day we still have no idea what anyone meant by that.
- Reading week. A blessing and a curse because whilst you have a week off to catch up on work, the bleak reality of it involves staying in bed with Netflix and then panicking about the pile of work you have to do in a very small space of time.