Where have I Been?

Well, it been well over a month and there has been no journalistic output or otherwise from me.

My excuse? I'm a student.

When I stated that excuse, what was your initial thought?

He's lazy? He's just been drinking? or some other stereotypical cliché concerning student life?

If you did contemplate any of the above, you would have been wrong. When I said that my lack of electronic pondering was due to being a student, I was implying that I was far too busy with work.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines work as follows:

"work (n): Physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something."

Mental effort- yes.

Activity which mental activity is directed towards- degree.

For those who don't know (note: the following may sound patronising but my intention is by no means so) a degree involves assessment by means of exam or written assignments, which involves the individual to do work, the amount conditional on the aspirations in mind. For me, my aspiration to do well is deep-rooted and endemic in my daily cycle of thought and seamlessly co-ordinated with my conscience in times of apathy.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that students in this country seem to be categorised far too readily by a stigma well-founded in today's society. For some, this is not an issue, not because they conform to the image necessarily but maybe because they are not necessarily troubled or offended by this process. For me- this is an oversight impossible to ignore.

At this point, I want to make it clear that in discussing this, I'm not looking for waves of overoptimistic and disingenuous praise for what I do. I don't. What I do want is for students to be classified and judged as individuals and not labelled by the zeitgeist that surrounds university life at this present time. In no other society would a decent person dare classify one person by a number of unrealistic, unfair and inaccurate thoughts without meeting and forming their own opinions about them, so why does it seem social acceptable to do it with students?

While the issue isn't racism per se, the idea of forming opinions or notions about an individual with only common stereotypes and outdated illustrations is analogous to the sense of discrimination that surrounds racism or any other form. Of course to try and draw distinct parallels between sexism and what I am describing would be to belittle the struggle of those who fought for those rights which identified them as individuals and not figures of lesser stature in the public domain.

Whilst here I try to outline my distain with the current view of students, I don't expect a revolution mirroring that of the feminist movement or Dr. Martin Luther King, I ask only for the public to think a little harder about the person they address when they are informed that that very individual is a student.