SOCIAL STUDIES

A CV consisting solely of academic and work achievements will not please employers. They’ll be worried you’ll want their job. Therefore, you need a list of extracurricular activities proving that you’re a ‘well-rounded person’ – so well-rounded that employers can easily push you around.

But beware. Each activity comes with an attached social scene. Once in, it’s hard to leave. Assimilation happens imperceptibly, by degrees; you’ll audition for a play and do a bit of netball practice, and before you know it you’re staying up till 5am to read lines with your co-star, before getting up at 6am to wash the team kit.

Here’s all you need to know about social anthropology – in other words, groups and cliques. Most of them are like Japan, Ukraine and other countries that prohibit dual citizenship; they won’t allow you to be a member of any others.

JOCKS AND SPORTS

Made infamous by films set in US high schools, the more jocks get themselves a bad name, the more they revel in it. Often the logical evolution of the Lad or Ladette (see ‘Early Days’, page 47).

Although seemingly identical, jocks are organised into a complicated hierarchy. Roughly speaking, there are mixed netballers, footballers and rugby players (all other sportsmen or women fit somewhere in the spectrum). While muscle definition and sporting status increase from left to right points of the spectrum, a tendency to intellectualise about sport dwindles. A rugby prop-forward is unlikely to use a phrase like ‘tendency to intellectualise’ and more likely to set light to their farts, for instance.

You could ingratiate yourself by trying out for a team (see the relevant Bluffer’s Guide), but it’s far easier to adopt the role of team social secretary, either formally or informally. This involves organising team practices, timetabling matches, masterminding socials and knowing the rules of the game, or at least the drinking games. When the season starts, feign a hamstring injury, and when the drinking ban comes into effect two weeks before the league final, go home for a fortnight. If you’re asked to don a sweaty eighth-hand cat costume and prance around as the team mascot, you’ve been caught out. The aim is to be the social keystone of the team, albeit one that is temporarily crocked – not to channel the character of Mouth in One Tree Hill.

THESPS AND THE THEATRE

Student theatre is a great night out; the tickets are cheap and they let you drink through the performance. But discovering what’s on might prove to be tricky because, due to the fact that most ‘theatres’ will only be able to accommodate friends and hangers-on of the cast, publicity is never a main priority. The beauty of this is that once you’ve made it into the audience, everyone will assume you’re supposed to be there.

If the worst happens and someone has the temerity to question your bona fides, explain that you were down in London playing the entire female cast in an experimental performance of Hamlet. If they start to look suspicious, ask if they’re going to the Fringe again this year and await a stupefyingly self-appraising monologue on the subject (the Fringe being the Edinburgh Fringe, a month-long theatre and comedy festival that takes place throughout August). Everybody will talk about taking their play to the Fringe, and some of them actually will. There’s no real need to go yourself, although it is a lot of fun. Just mention C venues and the attached bar, Forest Fringe, and lasagne sandwiches. If asked how you managed to find accommodation, in a period when prices quadruple and everywhere is full, talk vaguely about ‘crashing on a friend’s floor’.

Theatre people are split into two camps: the ones who just adore being on stage, darling (namely actors), and the ones who prefer the dimmer backstage lighting (namely everyone else: producers, stage managers, techies, set designers, make-up artists, etc.). Then there are directors who, in the Venn diagram of theatre, live in the overlap between these two circles.

Note that everyone is to be referred to by their proper industry title. Student theatre is a serious business and ‘am dram’ (amateur dramatics) is a dirty phrase. But mock all you want, now; these are the proactive aesthetes who’ll be waltzing across living room TV screens in a few years’ time. Befriend early on. Watch out for the Andrew Lloyd Webbers-in-training, who narrate their daily routine in song. If being woken up to a concerto on the importance of brushing your teeth sounds like fun, join in for the chorus. You’ll have made a singing partner for life. Or at least until the divorce.

For a less chipper double act, search out the aspiring comedians. They’re far better at poking fun at themselves and have been known to do quite well. Oxbridge has a strong track record in both comedians (Monty Python, Armando Iannucci, Stephen Fry, Mitchell and Webb, Armstrong and Miller, et al.) and politicians (see ‘The Game of Life’, page 6), though the line between the two is increasingly blurred nowadays.

MUSOS AND MUSIC

Enjoying the music scene is a relatively easy thing to do (see ‘Going Out’, page 53). Gaining the trust and respect of music types is harder. With some, you gain respect by having a solid musical background – at least grade eight piano. With others, the reverse is true, and even minor prowess on the ukulele is treated as dangerously ‘classical’. Meanwhile, traditional rock bands are being relegated to the realms of a distant past. These days, at university, you’re more likely to find yourself living next door to a subpar Skrillex with a pair of cans and a deck than the reincarnated Kurt Cobain.

But don’t let the plethora of DJs or the complex Lego construction of their record-playing machines defeat you, if that’s the direction you want to take. The great thing about DJing is that it’s essentially plagiarism and there are numerous apps that promise to turn you into the love child of Mark Ronson and Calvin Harris. If even this sounds daunting, continue on to the second page of YouTube and you’ll find a remix obscure enough to pass off as your own.

Any group that gets to go on ‘tour’ is contractually bound to have a fantastic time and come back with guilty gossip.

On another note (probably a slightly flat one), don’t underestimate the choir. Any group that gets to go on ‘tour’, even if it is to sing hymns in churches, is contractually bound to have a fantastic time and come back with guilty gossip. However angelic their voices or pristine their robes, they did something silly out there. Luckily, they’re dying to tell you; nothing that happens on tour stays on tour. Keep this secret even slightly more successfully than they managed to and you might just be trusted to join next year’s trip (regardless of your faltering falsetto).

HACKS AND JOURNALISM

As with student theatre, student journalism is a perfect rip-off of its real-life equivalent. Deadlines are fraught, scoops are celebrated, and rivalries between different news outlets run deep (watch out for being fed false tipoffs by rival hacks).

It’s very easy to get involved in student journalism, as every paper is constantly taking on new recruits. Mostly because you don’t get paid anything (rather like real journalism these days), but also because a term is about as long as anyone can cope with the extra deadlines. It’s worthwhile getting involved, though, because pretending to be a writer, even for a term, looks great on your as-yetunwritten CV. Two things to keep in mind are that every punning headline, however original or clever it seems, has been thought of before by either The Sun or The Guardian, or even Bluffers.com; and that the journalists who go on to succeed are the most ruthless, not necessarily the most talented. (In 10 years’ time when they’re BBC correspondents, you can remark that when you were rewriting their illiterate stories, they were so dim they thought Pearl Harbor was a blues singer.)

Experimental and occasional publications abound. Some will claim to be magazines, but most will accept the status of ‘zine’ (not necessarily half as good as a magazine but always half as professional-looking). These zines will be thought up at the pub, often very late at night, and solely feature articles by the people who started them. To set one of these up, all you need is two to three vaguely literate friends, a one-word title (preferably something along the lines of Heure, Gioventù, or Mots) and a black-and-white printer (the more budget-looking the final publication, the more integrity you can claim to have – just look at Private Eye). If the costs associated with printing enough copies for the three contributing editors prove to be too much of an investment then you can always start a blog.

ACTIVISTS AND POLITICS

Nowadays, passing for a politically engaged individual is as easy as calling Nick Clegg (or David Cameron, or Ed Miliband, or Nigel Farage) an incompetent, feckless liar. For example, refer scathingly to the Lib Dem party broadcast in which Clegg walked through a desolate street littered with bits of torn paper (supposed to represent the broken promises of the past Labour leadership) and promised to oppose the increase of university fees. Then call him incompetent and feckless again. And calculate how much debt you’re already in despite it only being the second Saturday of your first year.

American students, who are paying even more than you, will have little sympathy, however, and will regard all politicians as ‘European’ and ‘liberal’ (both terms of abuse). Overseas students, who also pay big time, will have no sympathy either, but they’ll be too busy working to bother you.

If you are determined to be the voice of reason, or doom, remind your fellow students that the cost of university has been increasing steadily since 1998. Then, with a sigh worthy of Mother Teresa (maximum points for knowing she was Albanian, born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje), say, ‘In 10 years when they’re paying £18,000 a year, they’ll think we had it easy’. Thus you can appear aware, sympathetic and politicised with minimal effort.

That said, university is the best place for adopting an audacious political stance. There are just two rules to bear in mind: keep it radical and keep it left. If you’re lucky, a student sit-in will take place while you’re at university and you’ll be able to test out your anarchistic dogma by breaking into university buildings and painting banners. These events are great fun and also provide the perfect excuse for not handing in that piece of coursework or attending the last eight weeks of lectures. But remember to locate a back door to slip through undetected when you want a shower or a meal that doesn’t consist of Doritos.

Bluffers looking to go the extra mile should suss out the post of student union president early on. This involves befriending the current president and becoming their protégé. While resisting their demands to sleep with them (a valuable early lesson in separating sex from the workplace), run for ‘office’, winning the popularity contest off the back of the past president’s friends and followers, and enjoy your fully funded year out. If you’re willing to protest against unpopular legislation, organise a sit-in, a boycott of lectures or a campaign of minor public mischief – especially as most of this happens anyway.

At some stage, while all or some of the aforementioned activities are taking place, you will be expected to attend lectures and tutorials and study for your chosen degree. Don’t take this too seriously; it’s entirely incidental to the more important business of getting an education.