When looking for the type of style of language we wanted to use we came across 'the Vice guide to university' The type of language used in this is light hearted, whitty and very straight talking. This is the type of effect we would like to achieve in our outcome.
From the archives
ACADEMIC SUCCESS
Don’t worry so much. A 2:1 is the most common grade. Nobody gets firsts except weird brainiacs or Chinese people. This looks great on graduation day but understand that straight A students have endured years of overbearing parents, endless maths tests and “educational toys” for Christmas presents. For the men, when they get to 32 they spend thousands on rare Stars Wars figures because they never had them when they were young. The women? It usually manifests itself in a huge dildo collection, prostitution, madness, suicide or becoming a sexually voracious, piss drinking slattern. Good six-month-girlfriend material if you can handle the suicide attempts.
BED SHEETS
A lot of students, especially the boys, are little wimps struggling to understand life away from the comfort of mummy’s bosom. This is why they don’t wash their bed sheets for a whole year. They sleep on gallons of dried cum, piss, vomit, spilled beer and tiny particles of Original Cool Doritos. This is how they get “fresher’s flu”. It’s because they can’t take care of themselves. They invented a thing called the internet a while ago and if you type in www.google.com and enter “healthy diet” you can probably stop all this happening. Also, don’t be scared of the Launderette. Just ask the immigrant lady how to work it. Or do a service wash. It’s more expensive but time-wise it’s a lot more economical.
COCAINE
Forget this until you get a job or you attend university in Liverpool or London. If you get into it (mistake) just make sure you do it properly. No Scarface posters or Hawaiian shirts. Do quick bumps off 20p coins instead of 5-minutes-to-prepare lines off toilet seats. Also, no bumps after 4.30 A.M. as 99 per cent of the time nothing good is going to happen after that time in the morning. Getting a girl back to your halls is easier if you’ve got some coke there. We know a guy who was so desperate to bang this girl he got her back to his dorm on the promise of coke. He didn’t have any so he faked it with sugar. To cover up the fact that it was sugar he put it in the microwave to “dry it out” before chopping it up into lines. It didn’t work, but you have to appreciate the ingenuity.
DEBT
Hahahaha. This is why I never went to university. Even if you’re thriftier than a person who recycles their own toilet paper you can expect to be in AT LEAST £20,000 worth of solid gold debt by the time you graduate. If you can get your parents to pay your rent you’ll still be in about £10,000 of debt. Unless you’re a millionaire and can afford to have that debt hanging over you for about 40 years, ask yourself this question: is that three year course in 3-D Digital Design really worth the effort? What are you going to be qualified for? Being an intern at a computer games magazine while all your friends who fucked their A-levels up are making £25,000 a year selling mobile phones?
EGGS
As well as noodles and spaghetti, eggs are all that you cunts will be eating for the next three years. You can’t make them in the microwave but you can throw them around your halls when you’re drunk (hilarious). These are the basis of the classic student dish, Spanish omelette. Boys who think they’re classy invite girls over to their house and give them £5.99 wine and a Spanish omelette when they want to impress them. Most of the time the girl is thinking: “He promised me a ‘chilled cordon bleu sesh’ and he’s serving me an omelette with potatoes in it.”
FRIENDS
As much as you want to be the moody outsider Ian Curtis guy, you’re going to need friends to get you through all this shit. If you’re shy, have a few drinks then be loud and gregarious at as many parties as possible. Eventuallly something will fall in your lap. People will spread the word that you’re funny at parties and you’ll get invited back. Eventually you’ll have so many potential friends that you’ll have to go through the editing process. See viceland.com (Happiness Issue) for more details.
GAYS
University is where a large majority of people experience their first dabblings in the exciting world of homosexuality. The best thing to do is to experiment as freely as possible, but be careful, don’t bow to peer pressure. The LGBT Society is huge in all the universities but that doesn’t mean they’re not annoying self-satisfied pricks who have swallowed so much mid-90s liberal dogma that having a conversation with them is like talking to an insane 90-year-old woman. It’s barely-remembered catch phrases and blank expressions the whole time.
They’re the ones self-righteously handing out sexual advice leaflets and free condoms while you’re waiting to get your lunch. Like anybody who’s old enough to go to college doesn’t know how to avoid sexual diseases and buy their own condoms anyway. And sorry, men who like dressing up in women’s clothes does not qualify as a social group. It’s a sexual foible. Should we have support groups, pamphlets and long public meetings about empowering people who buy underwear three sizes too small or people who like fat hairy Greek taxi drivers who dollop ladels of yoghurt on their gigantic hairy balls while they’re waiting to pick up a fare?
HALLS
More rules. Don’t eat other people’s yoghurts. Or any of their food. Conversely, if somebody steals your food from the fridge, don’t leave gay little outraged notes for them in the fridge. Track the fucker down and confront them directly. Poke them in the eyes and kick them in the crotch.
Also, don’t set the fire alarms off at two in the morning. What are you, eleven? Most importantly, don’t have sex with the people you live with unless you’re going to marry them. University is a chance to get laid as many times as possible with as many different people as possible. Leave commitment until your 30s.
INSANITY
Year two affects some people like a mini mid-life crisis. There’s the realisation that you’ve pissed away your first year and that now, all of a sudden, you’ve got to start getting yourself together or the whole thing will be a gigantic waste. This is where the weak-minded and the druggies start to wobble and develop signs of madness, like not coming out of their rooms for days, cutting themselves, crying out of context etc. These people need your help. Talk to them honestly about how much they’re fucking themselves up and if, after six months, they show no signs of responding, then force them to quit university, rethink everything and go back to real life. Unless they’re setting fire to your house or killing animals, DO NOT take them near any NHS psychiatric units. If you get sectioned (detained against your will under the Mental Health Act) you are fucked forever. Rember Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted? The reality is a million times worse. You’ll be plunged into a twilight world of really strong sedatives, cigarette-smoke-filled dayrooms, constant yelling, farting, puking, crying and people who are thirty years older than you waking you up in the middle of the night crying and asking to borrow your clothes. Flirting with heroin and burglary is less risky than flirting with the mental health system. You have no fucking idea.
JOBS
Unless you’re a leech with rich misguided parents, you have to get a job at college. It keeps you in touch with the real world outside of student life and gives you a sense of perspective in between the all-night wine drinking and three hour lectures about social media trend predicting. FACT: if you have a job, internship or work experience while at university, the chances of you getting a job when you leave are quadrupled.
KNOWLEDGE
The pursuit of this is the main reason you’re at university. Just a reminder. Like we said before, it’s costing you at least £20,000.
LOVE & MARRIAGE
No time for this. You’re in a three-year sprint. Don’t let lust and sentimentality get in the way of the ONLY REASON YOU ARE AT UNIVERSITY. Working. Doing your exams. Touching strangers beneath their underwear night after night. Forming bands so you can get backstage blowjobs. What with 9/11 and all the envrionmental disasters, getting married seemed like a good idea three years ago. The reality is it takes maturity, patience and a steady job. Not for you.
MEDIA STUDENTS
They have courses where you can learn how to be a TV presenter but the people who teach you how to do it are failed TV presenters who wear cancer wigs in bed. The people who teach you how to be a journalist are bitter hacks from the local paper who became alcoholics and couldn’t hack it on the newsdesk any more. If you want a job in the media, the key is to have ideas and to be prepared to work for free in shitty offices for months. People think working in the media is a carousel of comfort, huge pay cheques and glamour. Fact is, 98 per cent of media shitworkers experience that kind of thing once every three years. One of the only valid things that the first year feminists talk about is that media is still TOTALLY DOMINATED by rich white fat guys who like booze, whores, coke and paying their employees shit. You can forget waltzing through the doors with your piece of shit media studies degree and requesting a job starting at £25,000. It won’t happen.
NEWSPAPERS
Fuck those catamites who still walk around the Student Union with The Guardian poking out of their bag as a way of announcing to the world that “I’m clever and open-minded”. They are reverse chavs. Fundamentally, there is no difference between that person and a working class moron wearing a fake Burberry cap. They’re both walking around with a bogus status symbol trying to accumulate some identity.
People like Julie Burchill got it wrong when they did those hasty documentaries about “in defence of chavs”. The stigmatisation of chavs was not an attack on working class people. It was an attack on morons with bad taste. Go and hang out with all the people from Islington queueing in line to go and watch Talvin Singh play a concert. They’re not working class but they’re all fucking morons with bad taste. People who work at daily newspapers don’t have time to distill simple truths like that though. They just get a big whiteboard and write words like “Racist” “Celebrity” “Cocaine” “Paedophile” and “Football” and create stories around them. Make sure you get a fast internet connection from your university and read as many different news sources as possible. That way you can form your own opinion about things. Again, make it easier for yourself.
OXFORD
If you get in here and don’t totally fuck it up you’re pretty much made for life.
POLITICAL SOCIETIES
A total waste of time. Run by boorish losers with dogma breath. Take a course in political science or read some books if you’re that arsed.
QUAD VODS
Selling quadruple vodka shots is illegal but if you give the student an empty pint glass and two smaller glasses with vodka in it then it makes it OK. And it’s not vodka. It’s distilled surgical spirit with flavourings in it. Amazing for breaking the ice with new people but in the long-run? Enjoy going blind.
RATS
These are what you get if you live near a pub or a restaurant and are a messy cunt who never cleans the kitchen or living room. They may be a source of amusement for a while and the Crispin Glovers among you might protest that they’re living beings with as much right to life as humans but bear in mind these fuckers carry myriad disesases that can kill you. If you let them live they will breed and then you will be charged about £150 by a pest control service who will douse your house with poison. Maybe they’ll kill some of the rats but they won’t stop the stench of their decomposing bodies that’ll start coming through your floorboards for the next nine months. Suuur-WEET!
SOAP OPERAS
No time for this either. If you get to a point where you can remember watching Neighbours twice a day more than five times in two weeks then you’re probably fucked.
TATTOOS
Go nuts. Traditional is always best though. No Chinese tummy tattoos for girls. No logo of any band unless it’s Crass, Eyehategod, Black Flag, Misfits or Motorhead. Bands like that designed their logos so they’d look good as tattoos. No graffiti tattoos. No mystic symbols. A red devil on the arse of a drunken 35-year-old swinger mum of three is a million times better than getting an AK-47 on your leg because you’re trying to divert attention away from the fact that you’re the biggest fucking dweeb in the world.
VENEREAL DISEASE
Register with a doctor. Like all the things we’re saying here, just be smart and don’t be scared of life. A wart on your penis or vagina can be cleared up in five minutes. Just next time be more careful. However, AIDS can be a bit more difficult to cure.
WIM WENDERS
You’re probably going to have to sit through one of his films during your time here.
XANAX
If you find an American exchange student, make friends with them. They will have Xanax. Also ask them about Oxycodone, Percocet or Vicodin (overrated). Google them. Erowid.org is a good resource for drugs information.
YELLOW SKIN
If you have this you’re either Oriental or you have jaundice. Eat some fruit and vegetables. Peel it, put it in your mouth, chew and swallow. There you go little baby!
ZERO
Ending up £20,000 in debt, failing your exams and endless feelings of guilt and regret just so you could be lazy, play computer games and network with other drunk losers is just fucking stupid. If you’re unsure about university then fucking quit straight away. Save yourself the fucking bother. If you’re not serious about using university as a way to better yourself and instead treat the next three years as a gay social club then you should be gassed. They send videos of people like you to the Muslims in Bradford. They watch them in between the footage of the World Trade Centre and the London bombings. They’re laughing at you, you lazy, privileged, Western piece of shit. You are the reason that World War 3 is happening.
ANDY CAPPER
