Feel like you've been shafted this year at University? That’d be because you have. What a mess it’s been, students paying full price for student accommodation at the beginning of the year, to taking out a full year of saas in the thought that you might return to uni at some point, the list goes on. led on the whole year and told that maybe just maybe we might return to some form of normality, only to have that door slammed in our faces and told that not only is the uni not sorry about it, but they are effectively penalising us through marking and grading that has not been modified to take into account these unfair circumstances. 

I’m not expecting to win this election, I’m just here to let you know that the university will continue to shaft you at any chance they get. No matter what other union representatives say. if they can’t even get rid of graduation fees they will not be able to stop the financial, social and mental disadvantage we have been hit with and could potentially be hit with again next year.

well yer old pal archie has a plan that guarantees you will not be shafted twice. DONT GO TO UNIVERSITY. Take a break until this has all died down, don’t risk another year of online university, it’s pish. Save your money and time. We only get a finite number of years in university, don’t waste any more than you need to like me, in zoom lectures comfort eating gallons of ice cream as I stare dead eyed into a black abyss of a screen dotted with names and the occasional extrovert bold enough to turn their camera on.

Savour and enjoy your time in uni before you enter the post covid world, before you get your ambitions and dreams viciously beaten out of you by an economy so beleaguered it would be shot in the face and melted into glue Cheltenham style. Before you enter a post-apocalyptic wasteland of a job market where university graduates will be forced into royal rumble style interviews, armed not with cv’s but with steel chairs and blades, battling to the death like Pitbull’s in a dog fight for employment. Where our degrees will be about as valued and appreciated as a drowned bag of kittens.

as a final hail mary before you leave give me a vote to let the higher ups know that they ripped it this year and ease my existential dread