IT’S ALL ACADEMIC
READING LISTS
Don’t be daunted by reading lists. You can safely ignore most of the contents. They were compiled in haste by distracted tutors unsure whether the titles are still, or ever were, in print. To give the impression of familiarity, pick one title – any title – from the ‘Further reading’ section and read the introduction. It’s the oldest trick in the book, but that’s fine because a) this isn’t school and nobody is trying to catch you out any more, and b) your supervisor will be pleased that you read at least one book, namely the one with the oldest trick listed in it.
The only time you genuinely need to read a book cover to cover is if your supervisor wrote it. It’s probably on the list for royalty-boosting purposes rather than relevance, but you will be expected to know it.
Otherwise, talk vaguely about having done ‘background reading’ and ‘reading around the subject’. Anything can be justified this way: will.i.am’s as yet unpublished autobiography has valuable insights into British cultural history, for instance; that book about the Premier League season has fascinating information for engineers about goal-line technology, etc.
LECTURERS/TUTORS
There are five types of academic. Get to know them (but not too closely):
Mentors
The ones who inspire you to get out of bed for a nine o’clock lecture, or to actually go and see that exhibition at the British Museum before it closes. They’re fun and engaging and use Avatar to explain complex psychoanalytic theory, or ‘Gangnam Style’ parodies to elucidate the finer details of intellectual property law. They do cool, non-academic things during holidays, like take their rock band on a tour of Cuba. Pass marks in their paper will beat the average for the year. If you’re in any way attracted to them, they default to the category below.
LILFs, TILFs, SILFs
These are Lecturers/Tutors/Supervisors I’d Like to Fancy. (Other variants of the acronym exist.) Invariably married with children or gay – whichever is less convenient for you – and not attractive in real terms, this is magnified by their drab surroundings. They do dull things during holidays like redecorate the bedroom, and when they tell you in unnecessary detail about this, you wonder if it’s some sort of come-on.
As above, picking their papers will ensure that you do better in your end-of-year exams. Often mistaken for mentors, any work ethic they inspire is aesthetically, not academically, motivated.
Oldies
Wispy white or grey hair; corduroy jackets with mismatching suede elbow patches; leather briefcase; resistance to technology and punctuality; deep-set dislike for the rest of the university administration. Often double up as mentors, but have tenure. Whispered about as hero or idol: ‘Apparently he used to be a freedom fighter in South America…is the world’s leading expert on a particular kind of snail,’ etc. They do intriguing things during holidays like have former heads of state as house guests. The ultimate bluff is to be seen having a drink with them, preferably a malt whisky.
Mumblers
Not to be confused with oldies, these are the faculty members with absolutely no stage presence, making it irrelevant whether or not they have anything interesting to say. Nobody knows what they do during their holidays as they’ve never explained it comprehensibly. The only useful thing about a mumbler is that you can legitimately mumble utter rubbish back at them.
Half-wits
Neither inspiring, attractive, endearing nor easy to hoodwink; in other words, few redeeming qualities. Spend their holidays researching their niche subject. Prone to giving too much attention to the annoying know-all who arrives five minutes early and yet saves their question (which they already know the answer to) for the last five minutes of the class. There’s a reason for this: they used to be them.
LECTURES
The archetypal image of student life: a draughty, high-ceilinged theatre with tiered rows of wooden benches angled towards a professor of something obscure peering through his glasses at the jumble of notes on the lectern in front of him, perhaps talking in Latin, on a sunny afternoon… In reality, you will be watching a PowerPoint presentation projected onto the whitewashed wall of a half-empty prefab at half past nine in the morning, finishing early because of a technical problem.
If you do attend lectures, work in the offbeats. Every time the rest of the room starts scribbling or typing, recline in your chair and leisurely examine your cuticles. When they’re bored and nothing is happening, write intently on your laptop. This is a great way to psych people out (see ‘Exams’, page 86).
For arts students, a more convenient alternative is sourcing TV documentaries and radio podcasts. Louis Theroux’s back catalogue is fantastic for anthropology students, for instance. BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time is an encyclopaedic archive of radio broadcasts that covers everything from Romanticism to the theory of relativity. All of which can be listened to from the comfort of your own bed at an hour to suit you, and it’s less embarrassing falling asleep there than in lectures. Though possibly more crowded.
For science students, attendance at lectures is more important. In the arts, only knowing what everyone else knows isn’t as impressive as knowing something they don’t. In the sciences, though, where understanding is gained in a linear and cumulative way, not knowing what everybody else knows is more likely to result in a medical malpractice suit or a collapsing bridge than a high first. But don’t despair. Provided you can stay awake, lectures are the least demanding format in which to consume the expertise of your academic elders. And despite being timetabled for an hour each, they are only 50 minutes long; the idea is to give you time to travel between lectures, though in practice nobody manages two lectures in a row.
Contrary to popular belief, the best excuse for missing a lecture is not a hangover: it’s having a cold. No 100-word summary that finally explains postmodernism is worth stifling a cough or plugging a runny nose for 50 minutes. Which may be why nobody quite understands postmodernism.
The lectures most worth attending are the ones just before the exam. The lecturers inevitably realise, in panic, that they’ve forgotten to cover a question which is about to come up. So watch for the telltale signs: ‘I know the timetable said we’d cover Wagner’s operas, but instead I’d like to talk a bit about Stravinsky…’ That means there’s a question on Stravinsky in the exam, and you’re just about to get the answer provided on a plate.
If you have to miss an unmissable lecture, there are some recovery tactics. The first is repeated lectures. This is like catch-up TV, except the time delay is a year, not an hour. The freshers won’t even recognise each other, and so will assume you’re supposed to be there. The second is persuading someone to ‘share’ their lecture notes with you. This is a bit more of a gamble because other people’s notes range from revelatory to incomprehensible. Finally, you might find a recording or transcript of the lecture. These are often uploaded onto the university website to aid dyslexic students. Have no qualms about piggy-backing on resources aimed at others: this is called ‘using your initiative’ (and they all get free Macs, anyway).
If all else fails, you can always default to JSTOR (that’s JournalSTORage, a library of scholarly papers and journals, minus the dust) – useful but time-consuming, and means having to develop genuine research skills – or, as a quick and dirty last resort, Wikipedia. This means having to develop a very good bulls**t detector, though this is another vital research skill.
ESSAYS
Science students can skip this section. The longest sentence demanded of you – apart from the suspended one you receive after that drunken business with the shopping trolley – is the equation for standard model Lagrangian density. (But then this does code the theory of everything, except for gravitons, and not even War and Peace covers gravitons.)
The most important thing about essays is the obvious: read the question, and then answer it. It will be straightforward. Essays are designed to show what you do know, not what you don’t. So, find a way of applying what you know, or at least what you’ve cut and pasted from someone’s website, to the question. Some things can be applied universally – arguments over the difference between morals and ethics, for instance.
The most important thing about essays is the obvious: read the question, and then answer it.
The more footnotes1 you can put in an essay, the better. So long as they appear plausible sources, nobody will ever check them out2. Said to have been invented by the Venerable Bede3, they’re vital but can also be an Achilles heel4. The American feminist and writer Joanna Russ recalls asking ‘a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: “It was the footnotes.”’5 Increase your footnote count with judicious use of ‘ibid’6 and ‘passim’7.
Luckily, most academic texts have migrated online, which means that with a quick CTRL+F search you can look up that passage, on which page it was, in the journal by the guy with the hair, you know the one.
TUTORIALS AND SEMINARS
The only difference between tutorials and seminars is the number of people in attendance: from fewer than there should be in seminars down to hardly anyone in tutorials. In these classes you’ll be expected to discuss the things that you’ve written in relation to the things that people most probably far cleverer than you have written. Don’t think that unpacking your own opinions will be any easier than explaining somebody else’s. In your defence, academics tend to have the added advantage of knowing what on earth it is they’re on about. In your defence again, they’re notoriously bad at imparting this expertise. So if asked to feed back on Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy or another equally esoteric text, defer to the most elaborate bluff of all: no bluff. Saying that you have absolutely no idea what Pavlov was trying to prove with his dogs or what Plato was trying to illustrate with all those rings will no doubt be the most refreshing contribution your supervisor has heard all year and will, hopefully, ignite his or her own latent dislike for the great thinkers.
If this tactic returns a disappointed sigh, then change tack and interrogate the terms of the question instead (see ‘Interviews’, page 26, and ‘Essays’, page 82). This is easy. All you need to do is repeat the sentence you’ve just been asked with a randomly chosen emphasis:
Supervisor ‘James, how would you describe the developing role of feminism in today’s society?’
You ‘The developing role of feminism in today’s society?’ (Or, ‘The developing role of feminism in today’s society?’, etc.)
But beware: play the language trickster and you may encourage people to try to catch you out. If you refer to Daniel Defoe’s cockney heroine Moll Flanders, for example, as being ‘literally a bag of money or a jewel dropped on the highway’, this may elicit a response such as, ‘I didn’t know Defoe was interested in abiogenesis.’ This sort of semantic nonsense can go on forever.
THE LIBRARY
Vast rooms, infrequently visited, full of little-borrowed old books and shiny new PCs – and still the university hasn’t quite worked out what the balance should be. With Wi-Fi in your room and a university website login, there may be no reason to enter a library until final exams – to at least adopt the appearance of hard work, or because the library will have become a bit of a social hub.
Choose your station carefully. Near, but not next to, the toilet is best, depending on how many free refill coffees you had in the café opposite. Levels of visibility are also tricky to get right. Opt for a seat in full view of the main thoroughfare, or in the most secluded corner possible – never anywhere in between; you’ll only get cramp from craning your neck at the sound of every pair of passing footsteps.
Once you’ve found the seat, become parochial. Don’t worry if your set of unopened highlighters spends more time saving this seat than you do sitting in it; everybody marks their territory out in this way. If you don’t, you’ll be forced to play the part of flâneur, aimlessly wandering the library’s many floors looking for bed and board. But even this is better than sitting at home – the more hours you clock in the library (working or otherwise), the better your exam results, allegedly.
When you do sit down to work, study effectively. Declaring yourself to be ‘a visual learner’ and constructing elaborately colour-coded spider diagrams not only means you have more pens and paper to fill your section of the table with, but will also throw off the other lacklustre revision strategies of other students. (They only award a certain percentage of firsts every year. Just saying.)
Despite the introduction of Wi-Fi and vending machines, librarians remain traditional in their attitudes to noise. That means headphones, silenced phones and whispers are a must. But rather than being a pain, these stipulations allow you to mask what you’re really listening to.
EXAMS
Exams are all that stand between you and genius status. There’s a surprisingly generous crumple zone for failure: 40% is the standard pass rate; half-marks guarantee you a 2:2 (aka a ‘Desmond’ – Tutu, after the South African archbishop and activist), 60% will get you a 2.1 and 70% or over means a first, or ‘Geoff’ (Hurst, as in the footballer). Whoever designed a mark scheme in which it’s near impossible to be awarded a third of the marks was definitely a glass-40%-empty kind of a soul. But until a better system for testing the intelligence of students comes along, there are a few rules for puffing up your academic feathers:
1.Read the directions all the way through before beginning.
2.Have a banana before you go in to prevent your stomach embarrassing you out of hunger and sip water throughout; apparently both will increase your productivity.
3.Don’t panic and quote lines from films or TV as philosophical platitudes. However culturally clueless your examiner is, they will know that it was Spiderman and not Voltaire who most recently said, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’
4.If you do have the perfect quote but no idea who said it, attribute it to Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867): nobody has ever finished it so won’t be able to prove you wrong.
5.Raise your hand in the first five minutes, and every half-hour thereafter, to ask for extra paper. This is guaranteed to psych out those in your near vicinity, decreasing the average mark in your year and subsequently increasing your chances of graduating in the top percentile.
6.Use your handwriting to disguise your spelling or fumbled equations. If you’re typing your exam script, pray that spell check has been left enabled.
7.If you run out of time, bullet points are more permissible than you might think. Examiners are surprisingly sympathetic to this last-ditch attempt at imparting your knowledge. This is almost certainly because shorthand lists are infinitely easier to read than the essays of students who realise that they’ve finished with five minutes to spare and return to riddle their work with arrows and numbers.
8.Do listen to Terry Pratchett, who once wrote: ‘It is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.’
9.Ignore numbers 2 through 8 and go to the pub.8
Exams, like this chapter, can seem like a prescriptive litany of dos and don’ts. If this doesn’t sit well with your pink streak of hair, political dogma or general outlook on life and bluffing, which it more than likely doesn’t, remember that rules are there to be broken and examiners will always appreciate being shocked out of their slumber. The myth of the student who simply wrote, ‘This is,’ in response to the question, ‘Define courage’, is the ultimate accolade for the student of bluffing. (If you can convince someone that this ever actually happened, your bluffing prowess is proven.) But remember: for it to be clever you have to have got there first. As Christopher Columbus once said, there are no prizes for coming second, or for rediscovering America. Or was that Marx in Das Kapital? (Actually, what Columbus said was ‘Where the hell are we now?’) Either way, remember that Carol Vorderman got a third (or a ‘Douglas’, as in ‘Hurd’, the former foreign secretary) and still went on to be a successful mathematician and famous TV presenter, or that Paul Whitehouse dropped out completely and became a high-flying comedian.
1 Like this.
2 Anon, Big Book of Facts.
3 http://www.ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2008/1594.html
4 Ovid, Metamorphoses.
5 Russ, J (1983). How to Suppress Women’s Writing.
6 Ibid.
7 Ainsley, R (1988). The Bluffer’s Guide to University (1st ed.) passim.
8 Just kidding.