Life

11 Fears College Students Have For The Summer

It's coming folks. The summer is almost upon us. You can practically smell it in the air. The scent of hayfever, dutch gold and disposable barbecues is wafting all around us. I do hope you're all ready. When you're in college the Summer ahead is a long one, especially if you're not joining your privileged friends and travelling to chirpier climates for the months ahead. Here are some of the fears all college students have for the summer ahead;

11) J1 F.O.M.O

Ahhh there you are, sitting with a lovely cold pint and a happy head, exams are over, four months of freedom beckons and then along come the J1 brigade to crumble all of the joy. You have to sit there and listen to them shit on and on about what a whale of a time they're going to have getting hammered in a different country with a large amount of money from their oblivious parents in their crummy pockets, meanwhile all you have to look forward to is a summer of getting shitfaced in Mayo with your cousins. Life is shit.

10) Broke Ass Bitches

There is nothing nicer than the prospect of unemployment for four months. Four months of asking your parents for lifts everywhere and begging them for twenty euro for a night out. They insist that you won't need anymore, you'll just have to resort to robbing their drinks press dry. That'll teach them. On the flip side, if you do have a Summer job it's likely to be shit too. If you work in retail, then a Summer of long boringly boring days watching everyone else enjoy the sun (between showers) awaits you and if you're in hospitality, well then prepare for a summer of late nights, sweating your face off in the kitchen and missing fantastic nights out. Lose lose.

9) Homeward Bound

One of the shittest aspects of Summer, is that if you're a country bumpkin, then you'll have to repack the vast majority of your sorry life into 13 bags for life and move back in with the parents for a Summer of sun starved fun. You'll find that you have no tolerance whatsoever for any members of your family now that you have tasted day to day life without them. If you've been living at home anyway, you'll probably find them more annoying than usual, as now you won't have anywhere to escape to on a day to day basis. Inhale anndddd exhale.

8) Lost Love

It's fairly tough trying to maintain a relationship that started during the college year. Obviously this is a lot easier if you're both from the same place, but if you aren't, which is the more common problem, you'll be separated for the summer. Dry your eyes mate, it'll be alright. If you're both still in the same country then its workable, if not, its maybe sort of workable. Obviously you both have to want to stay together for this to work, you'd think that was a given but we all know couples with that problem. There's always Skype.

7) Unreasonable Goals

Every naive person out there starts out their summer with shitty unachievable goals, goals that we all know have more of a chance of happening than Lindsey Lohan joining the nuns. "I'm going to get thin, fit, learn to play the xylophone and be fluent in Portuguese by September". LET'S DO THIS! All we'll be achieving this Summer is gaining four pounds, more freckles and two new drunken toilet Facebook friends. Well we tried.

6) Cancelled Reunions

So you haven't seen half of your old friends since Christmas. You've all been planning a big reunion night out for months now. The time finally comes and four of you turn up. "WHAT THE HELL?" So it seems some of you decided to be sensible and adult and get a job for the Summer and ditch us all for your new friends, also known as customers. Well that's fine, no we aren't angry at all. In fact we're just going to drink enough for the eleven of us that were meant to show up and when we end up on the floor, it's all your fault.

5) Festival F.O.M.O

Why is it that festival tickets are always released around the end of the college year when we're at our lowest financial ebb? Yes, we are aware that there isn't ever really any other state that we're in, financially,but why not on our Birthdays or Christmas Day? WELL? Your friends casually mentioned it back in March and you brushed it aside, but little did you know that the sneaky, sensible little sluts had been craftily saving the whole time. Come July you'll be sitting at home watching as one by one, their "amazing eat sleep rave re-fucking peat" photos appear on Facebook. It's ok to feel the resentment and rage.

 4) Poverty Holiday

If you're in the upper class spectrum of depressed summer students, then you'll be going on holidays. Well for some isn't it? You were probably bate into booking Ryanair flights for €45 return to Shagaluf. Now, as the time creeps up on you, you slowly realise that you have nothing saved for it. Nothing whatsoever. There's sixty euro in your account that's going straight on Penneys bikinis that'll fall apart after a day in the sea. Ohhhhhhhh shit....There's only one thing to do here. Ask the parents for your Christmas present six months in advance.

3) Hayfever Season

Fuck you Hayfever. You just come along every May and try your level best to ruin our Summer. There we are, battling through with our sneezes and snot and big puffy heads. Sexy Summer look gone, out the door. Ladies, you may as well just throw those mascara wands in the bin because I doubt the emotional panda with conjunctivitis look is in the season. Expect to hear "bless you" more than "hello" for four months. Crying face.

2) Repeats

Students know from the minute they're finished their exams, whether they'll be back repeating in August or not. Call it intuition, call  it having done no work all year long and now having a good two months to shit yourself about it. You've now resigned yourself to the fact that you'll be back very soon, having to cram this crap into your brain and disappoint your parents even further. As for the gastronomical amount of money you have to fork out to re-prove what an utter failure you are, well, you won't even think about that until the results are out. Better get the candles out.

1) September Fear

Yes, we're all aware that it's only May. May however, is actually quite close to September in terms of getting your life in order. Remember those school days when you'd spend every minute of the Summer having a blast and not trying to think about going back to hell on the first of September? It's kind of like that in a way, the main difference being that we actually want to go back in September, in fact our September is your Summer. We will, however, be concerned with the deep seated fear we have that we won't be going back in September (fail, FAIL, FAILURE), where we're going to live in September, who we're going to live with in September and how fast September can roll around. Pretty fast hopefully. Once we get our life in order that is.

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Alison decided to follow a sensible career route and chose to study Media. She happens to think of herself as a kind of Irish Beyonce after four Coronas, which usually results in her being deserted on the dance-floor by her loving friends. Her horrifically short attention span seeps into many aspects of her life, resulting in her half hearing important facts and hating people who walk at a leisurely pace.