The Student Bubble

As students, some of the things that occupy our attention the most are often predicaments such as trying to assemble an acceptable outfit from our ‘floordrobe’, running out of mixers at pre-drinks and having improvise with Berocca, and fearing those inevitable Facebook tags from the night before. With all of these things taking up brain space, world events just don’t seem to pack enough punch to infiltrate this strange phenomenon of the student bubble.

I first realised that I was well and truly a prisoner of the uni bubble when I woke up one morning dressed as Jester from ‘Top Gun’ with cake in my hair, only to realise that in the past week, everyone had decided to hate Nick Clegg and that some non uni bubble students had been having some pretty wild protests. How did I find out about these world events? Through my Facebook news feed of course, with groups such as ‘Hi, I'm Nick Clegg and I'm a Liberal Democrat, LOL jk, I'm actually a Tory’ and ‘Why did Nick Clegg cross the road? Because he said he wouldn't’. Upon being thoroughly confused by these groups, I decided to peruse the BBC News website, and it hit me like a wet fish to the face just how out of the loop I had become.

The uni bubble is undeniably a love child of too much Facebook, loud music, YouTube, booze and sleep, all of which amalgamate to create a force field against current events and real life scenarios. It’s not the student’s fault however; it’s a vicious cycle, mainly centred around the wonderful act of sleep. We find ourselves sleeping ridiculous hours due to unmissable events which pop up daily on your Facebook home page. Everything seems more appealing when presented to you in a Facebook group: it’s a combination of the witty title followed by the appropriate follow up comments, i.e. ‘Dirty pint for you lad!’, topped with a smidgeon of peer pressure in the format of ‘friends attending’, making it a done deal.

We usually find ourselves ‘attending’ events that turn civilised gatherings, such as quizzes or cinema releases, into raucous affairs to the inevitable resentment of the non student population of the city. The release of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, for example, did weird and wonderful things to the students of Glasgow University, descending in troops after chinning a few pints of Butterbeer, with makeshift capes and drawn on scars, onto unprepared cinemas. It is precisely because we take novelty events too far, spending our time making event pages, sorting out costumes and talking about the genius of whatever event is in question, that we let the world with all of its predicaments pass us by.

You wouldn’t think it possible, but in the wonderful abyss of the student bubble, such things as weather can even pass us by. Sleeping until late, wandering into a lecture and coming home again to eat and sleep before going out that night, can sometimes, even on a day of extreme, news worthy conditions, only manifest a reaction such as, ‘Oh, my Uggs got pretty soggy today’ or ‘Do you think my tan will run tonight? Will I need to wear tights?’ During the harsh winter that this year, where roads were closed and things were freezing and exploding like nobody’s business, students all across Scotland’s concern was not whether their exams would be cancelled or whether the water pipes in the flat would burst in the cold weather, but rather if taxis would still be running in the torrents of snow, to safely ensure transportation to the licensed premises of choice.

Let’s face it: the booze itself doesn’t make us the sharpest tools in the box the next day, so much so that Barack Obama himself could waltz out into the street, pull down his breeches and desecrate on a church doorstep causing an international incident, and you would be none the wiser, instead keeping your eyes focused solely on the nearest Greggs for that much needed hangover pasty. Being out late boozing, in turn, results in you missing your favourite shows, requiring you to devote the next day to catching up online and thus leaving no time for watching informative shows, i.e. This Morning, the news or even Loose Women. Does it really matter, however, that we’re so oblivious to current events? I’m saying no: more fun means less stress, which means less wrinkles and lower blood pressure. The uni bubble: saving students hundreds in anti-aging products. Fact.