I must apologise for my lack of posts recently, but there has been a LOT going on! The previous sentence lays the basis of today’s post as I thought I would write about something which has frequently bothered the country and recently been proven wrong – Lazy students. An article on the Guardian website [click here to read said article], this February has argued that this is not true. I would like to debate this slightly as what people do not seem to take into consideration is that different people work differently. Personally, alongside my degree I volunteer at a primary school, a secondary school, am still Brown Owl at Brownies, and I now have a job, too! It sounds like a lot, but if you look at the Student Volunteer Week website, you will see people that do an awful lot more than me. This shows that students aren’t necessarily the lazy, lay-abouts that we carry the reputation of. In fact, some might argue that we are exploited because to get a career you need experience [luckily I love everything I do].
On the other hand, there are many people I know [probably into the double digits!] who don’t do anything besides go out. It is a part of university life, which should not be passed up, because it is one of those things that people will no longer do once university is over. Unfortunately those people who only go out, tend to be the ones who are never up on time to attend lectures and as a result never get assignments in on time. This would be those ‘lazy’ students that people complain of. One thing people never seem to think of, though, is that they are wasting between £10,000-£30,000+ of their own money [providing they finally grow up and get a job once their degree is over]. That leads me to my final point, the likelihood is that students will gain less in government loans than they would through claiming benefits: eg Jobseeker’s allowance, housing benefit, childcare [just throwing that one in there to be extremely judgmental]…the list never seems to end! At least the ‘lazy’ students are not scrounging all of this off of the government. Also, whether or not a student is ‘lazy’, the fact that they could be bothered to apply to university in the first place suggests that they may actually want to find a decent job sometime in the future.
This post has slightly changed it’s argument as it developed, but my point still stands – everybody is an individual, and not everybody can conform to society’s ideals. Just because one person acts in one way and another acts differently, doesn’t mean everyone follows the same stereotypes.
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