"Shame"

In the past week my alma mater has hit the news several times. It's been covered in the local press, national radio, and even on news sites on this side of the pond.

 It didn't make for pleasant reading.

That's disheartening for a proud alumnus because Glasgow University is a fantastic educational institution, with a great culture and campus atmosphere.

Students at Glasgow have since made a protest against sexism, on International Womens' Day, which makes me proud, but also actually a little ashamed.

Just under ten years ago I arrived on campus at Glasgow University for freshers' week, excited about the week and the years ahead of me. Before I'd left home for Glasgow people told me that I would be a 'QM girl'. This apparently meant that I loved 'alternative' music, and that on some level, I was proud to be a woman.

QM stands for Queen Margaret, who is often credited with bringing learning to Scotland. The Queen Margaret Union (QMU) is one of the two student unions on the campus. The other is the Glasgow University Union, although both are equally official and part-funded by the university. The GUU had begun as a male-only institution, so the QMU had started, at the turn of the 20th century, to cater for female students.

To clarify, UK universities don't have sororities (I'm still not entirely sure what a fraternity or sorority is). Instead UK universities have student unions, usually spaces on campus that provide various services to students including advice and support, as well as leisure, cheap food, and drink.

Glasgow is unique in having two unions, a remnant from the days when they were segregated. Although the QMU became co-ed in the 70s, and the GUU in the 80s, both retained distinct characteristics, and students could actively choose one to join. For some, including myself, it was a source of campus identity.

The stereotype of the GUU was rugby, tweed, cheap beer, excellent debating and a hint of chauvinism. The stereotype of the QMU was grunge, goth, lgbt, cheap jack daniels and a historical sense of feminism.

There was an ancient rivalry between the two buildings, sat at opposite sides of the campus. During the freshers' week address representatives from both sides would don colored t-shirts and cheer for their own side. Within a gothic building often said to have been considered as a set for Hogwarts, there was an amazing buzz of excitement not unlike Houses roaring for their Quidditch teams.

During my freshers' week the GUU hit the news for a headline in their daily newsletter, Filth. "No means yes and yes means harder" it said, a phrase that was condemned by rape support groups. I'm not sure it had any effect on my decision to join the QMU, to be honest, because that was going to happen anyway.

The stereotypes of the two unions were well-known. A campus staff-member once told me about a group called the "Freds", who watched Tom and Jerry cartoons (by Fred Quimby) in the GUU during lunchtime, followed by hardcore porn, while feminists known as "The Women's Group" protested outside on the streets.

That happened way before my time on campus, but these feminists were remembered in the QMU's constitution, which recognised continuing  support for "The Women's Group", and even though the group no longer existed, the clause remained just in case it was ever needed again.

After the GUU became co-ed in the 1980s, a men's group known as the 139 was formed. It honored the 139 GUU members who had voted against allowing female members. They were known to have male-only dinners and drinking sessions which were rumored to have elaborate rules. One I heard about was that they'd all stand in silence if a woman entered the room.

I don't have a problem with single-sex groups in principle, as long as their raison d'etre isn't purely to exclude. Oxford University has its notorious Bullingdon Club. St.Andrews University had a male group for a long time, named after a woman, Kate Kennedy (KK). The KK no longer exists though, after male members voted to admit women last year.

Having risen through the ranks of the QMU's board, I once attended a (different) dinner at the GUU, and was seated with some members of the notorious 139. They asked me if I was offended by their 'banter'. I was offended, but I just looked at them blithely, and said "it all just seems a bit homoerotic to me". They laughed.

While the GUU and QMU had had at times a vicious rivalry, that wasn't the case when I was a student. It was a post 9/11 world, the economy was good, but the two unions were both struggling financially and often worked together to achieve goals on campus. I enjoyed the GUU: I ate, drank, danced and socialized there, just not as much as at the QMU.

The unions both had particular cultures which were caricatured by their stereotypes. The GUU has had many female members and board members, though to my knowledge still hasn't had a female president (I'm wrong, see comments below. The GUU has had a handful of female presidents). In my final year I ran for election as QMU President, but lost out to a male friend. Incidentally, since going co-ed, the QMU has had more male presidents than female, although overall it's had far more women leading the Union.

I was disappointed when I read about the sexist comments that the Cambridge students experienced. I admit I don't know exactly what happened beyond what the news reports say, but what strikes me is that incident rings true to a stereotype with which I am familiar.

I was proud to see the protest in response, and the petition. And that's where I feel a bit embarrassed.

You see, I was a proud QMU member and proud female student, but my derision of campus misogyny was never really more than a sense of snobbery. As one friend pointed out to me this week, people who didn't like one union could just join the other, rather than attempting to make positive changes.

I asked another girlfriend and former 'QM girl' what she thought about the sexism accusations, and she replied, "I was smug because I was not one of them…when instead we should have made a stand against it.  In a way our joining the QMU gave us this shield that said 'well obviously I am against sexism, I am in the QMU'. Because others had made a stand in the past, we didn't need to bother because we co-opted their fight through our shared QMU membership."

We were passive feminists. We let boys be boys, maybe expecting that one day their jokes would get tired. I'm sure there wouldn't have been a cultural sea-change had we joined the GUU, but perhaps in an indirect way we perpetuated the GUU's culture.

A recent thread on Reddit asked school bullies why they used to bully. Many of the responses were from people who didn't realize that they were bullying, they thought that they were being funny and didn't realize that others didn't find them funny too.

It took an outsider, a member of neither the GUU or the QMU, a student from Cambridge, another Russell Group University like Glasgow, to point out the jokes are tired and no longer funny.

The incident at Glasgow and the media coverage seems to have resulted in a different kind of debate to the one that sparked the frenzy. I hope that can be a good thing.

stairmaster 3000

As you will have noticed, I have had little to say about job hunting recently. That's because I am taking a break, and I've put the career search on hold for a short time. My current job is great fun (tinned pumpkin aside) and I'm also very excited to announce something else:

I have paid off my overdraft!

I am indeed back to black. As you may recall, this was the first step in my five step plan, so now I can concentrate on saving a bit of money, and (gulp) learning to drive, which I promise, promise will start in the new year.

So this, along with graduating a few days ago (woohoo!) has made it a very good week for me.

But it's difficult to see my friends in different states of post-graduation despair. I see facebook status updates, receive text messages, and have conversations with people very close to me who are struggling in dealing with this time. I hear bitter words from friends who don't know what they want to do with their lives; those who do know what they want to do but are finding it impossible to get on the career ladder; those who thought they knew but it's not quite working out.

Some of my friends have just left Universityville, and have also just begun the rite of passage of uncomfortable disillusionment that occurs in the period between Uni and starting a career. I know how it feels. I spent 2 years reading up on jobs and job hunting, because I was doing the awkward shift into entry level work while still studying. I had the panic-ridden thoughts of "what am I doing?"
"what SHOULD I be doing?"
"am I doing the right thing?"
"Is this all I am worth?"
"Why can't I get where I want to be?"
"Is this it?"
"Why didn't I do things differently? Would it have made a difference?"
"Why won't someone give me a break?"
"What else can I try?"
"If this is all I can get, why even bother?"
"Where does all my money go?"
"Why is everyone else getting better opportunities than me?"

It's difficult to know what to say back to my friends though because I can relate all too well. Practical advice is usually not what they want to hear, and empty words like "I am sure it will turn out fine" are meaningless and insincere.

Most people find their way during this horrible period. Some shake up their lives a bit, go travelling, sign on, reconsider their priorities, find their own coping mechanisms and then find a way of making money. It's not easy, and there's little to say to reassure people.

I can't pretend to be a careers expert; for a start I don't really have a career, but I do have a lot of experience of the job-hunting mill (at least more than one of my student friends who stepped inside the Uni careers centre for the first time recently and was so scared she ran away).

I already went through these thought patterns and now have a clearer idea of how things work as well as a clearer idea of where I want to be. I don't have a problem with admitting to people, or myself, that I am living with my parents and working in a deli and that my career is currently on hold. When I started my first job out of University, as a staff assistant for the government, I was thinking too much about what my next step would be. When I was studying for my MSc, I was thinking too much about what I was going to do when I finished and how I would afford to live. Panicking too much about the next step made me panic too much about the one I was currently sitting on.

There are lots of approaches to job hunting and career starting, but the one that has worked best for me so far is to take things slowly, to take things one silly step at a time. When I moved back home in September, I set myself some very small goals indeed. But as silly as these goals may seem, and no matter what happens next, achieving the first one this week has made me feel like everything is on track.

miss no moneypenny part five

The final part of my 2007 financial planning series.

By now, I hope you’ve got some good simple money habits to keep you on track. You know where your balance is, you’re not living on a credit card, you’re withdrawing cash on a weekly basis, you might have a bit of extra cash coming in. So I’m going to start talking about spending money again. It’s okay, we’re allowed from time to time.

Food is an important thing to spend money on. I’d call it a life or death expenditure. But Supermarkets wants you to spend a fortune, so watch out. Marks and Spencers advertising, for example, despite its classy façade, uses the same salacious methods of appealing to your base desires as Amsterdam’s seediest sex-shops. And just like sex, you’ll actually get more and better food for your money if you invest a bit of affection and effort into getting some.

So forget entirely about faux designer food and trashy takeaways. Get your bargain bounty goggles on, because finding food deals is just as satisfying as high street sales. The supermarkets on the outskirts of town (Tesco, Morrisons, Lidl and Chinese Supermarkets) provide all the economy brands that local branches and cornershops don’t stock. Get your fill of value branded breads and grains, bumper-sized boxes of food and cleaning products. Be a brand whore and go for 2 for 1 deals, but only if you need the product in the first place. A member of my family once bought six watermelons because they were ‘on offer’, forgetting that nobody in the house actually likes them. They sat festering into interestingly fragrant food-fight ammunition.

If you’re an economy brand snob, many ‘own brand’ items are actually made by the same companies as the leading brands. I’m always wary about meat products but otherwise many products are the same or similar quality, except Heinz, which are usually the superior bean.

Always buy your fruit and veg from the wonderful green grocers your neighbourhood has to offer. Most of them will give student discounts and it can become easy to live well with very little expense.

Buying for yourself can be incredibly wasteful and expensive. Buying ready meals is even worse for your pennies and the packaging is landfill overkill. 70% of food produced and sold in the UK goes to waste and this impacts both our environment and our purses. I’m not suggesting you all start dumpster diving outside your local supermarkets (this is another way of keeping costs down, admittedly, but might break trespassing/theft laws). Grab your wheelie suitcases, band up with your flatmates and go on a food shopping day out. You’ll get to know the city better, burn off calories carrying bags, and you’ll save even more money if you share the shopping. If it’s not feasible to buy everything together, then suggest at least pooling bread and milk funds. This is what the most astute students among us do. A familiar sight in Lidl is of bunches of funky young students piling groceries into luggage together… It’s the modern day hunter-gather expedition.

miss no moneypenny part four

Part four in my 2007 financial planning series.

A few years ago there was a Guardian cartoon called ‘Lost Consonants’, and one of my favourites showed aerobic OAPS and a young McEmployee alongside the caption ‘many students work to make their grans stretch further.’ These days students are lucky even to get a grant, so I certainly ain’t putting in hours to pay my granny’s yoga fees. But various surveys predict that around half of the UK’s students are now working between 10-15 hours and earning about £70 a week. That’s over £3600 a year, and for many this is a necessity.

Finding casual work during term time shouldn’t be too hard in theory. Looking in shop windows, checking the Uni's advice centre, looking at sites like Monster and Jobs Direct are good starting points. Right now various outlets will be looking for Christmas relief staff if you’re finding yourself short of money for the end of term. This is also really handy for the staff discounts to pick up cheap gifts! The usual bar, coffee shop, and temping jobs are some obvious options, but there are other ways to pull in some extra cash than pulling pints.

Look around campus for students needing participants in surveys or studies – these usually pay a few pounds for little effort. Or try googling for ‘mystery shopper’ or ‘paid surveys’ – there are a number of UK organisations which will pay various amounts for equally little exertion. And if you’re good with google and have an internet connection, you could work casual hours for the fun text service Any Questions Answered (AQA). Visit www.issuebits.com for more information.

Even if you don’t need the money, but you think you can spare the hours, consider some sort of employment, whether paid or not. Working, volunteering or ‘getting involved’ as the Uni folks in the know put it, all count towards those immeasurable soft skills employers want as well as letters after your name. This is great if you do need to work through Uni, because you’re getting more return than just an hourly wage, you’re also earning CV fodder. You ain’t just stacking shelves or waiting tables, you’re building team skills (putting up with that lethargic tosspot of a colleague), numeracy skills (figuring out how many CDs you’re earning on your hourly wage) and problem-solving skills (kicking arseholes out of your pub at drinking up time). Seriously though, it all counts, and could help you score a higher starting salary after Uni.

For this reason, office temping can be useful employment for students to gain office skills, and often pays more than service sector jobs. However, like call centre work, temping can be soul-destroying, and is less sociable than serving your mates at their local bar.

Most people do manage to study and have other commitments, Of course, I can’t just encourage you to work while you should be studying. The usual guideline for part-time work is 10 hours a week if you’re doing full time education. Don’t let employers be pushy with you for more hours than you want to do, and never, ever, miss classes to work instead.

miss no moneypenny part three

Part three in my 2007 financial planning series.

I was drinking with some friends and someone suggested we go all out. One of our crew lamented a cash crisis situation. Not a problem, exclaimed another friend, you can extend your overdraft over the phone, right now, sitting here in this bar, drunk!

This is an example of bad financial planning, and I cannot recommend it much less than taking a roller coaster ride on the stock exchange with two thousand Zimbabwe dollars.

Okay, a night in doing personal accounts is not a scintillating exercise. However, it is vitally important to keep track of your money digits. This can be as little effort as reading your monthly statements and checking your balance every time you withdraw. Scanning these numbers will give you a basic awareness of where your money’s going and what spending pattern you can keep up. If things are getting tight, start withdrawing a certain amount each week and sticking to it. Don’t be tempted to take your card out, or to buy things online thinking that it’s not ‘real’ money. A number’s a number, and it’ll decrease whether you like it or not.

The best advice budgeting advice: try not to go into your overdraft. Banks can seem generous and it’s useful to have an interest-free overdraft to dip into during those personal ‘Northern Rock’ moments, but it’s not there to be lived out of.

I used to be petrified of ending up in the red, while a lot of students I knew casually talked about the hundreds of pounds they owed. When I ended up more in debt than I planned (and I use plan in a loose sense, because – confession - I didn’t plan at all) I understood the feeling of ‘overdraft underwhelm’. Being three hundred pounds into your overdraft is absolutely terrifying. Being £600 down isn’t really that much different, hey, it’s still the hundreds, right? But keep on spending, and you discover that being £1200 overdrawn doesn’t feel any different either, until you graduate and the bank wants their money back.

That might seem far off, but I am warning you from the future. I celebrated graduating this year with ten thousand pounds of student loan, minus twelve hundred pounds in my account and an I-O-U to the bank of mum and dad for a grand. I went over my overdraft once, missed some credit card payments, and now have to keep up with council tax bills (this one’s a real bugger) and self-finance a part-time post-grad. I paid off the credit card, but I’ll be living out of my overdraft for some time yet. I’m not one of the worst off, but I’ve left the splendour of spontaneous student life and believe me, I sorely miss it.

Make sure you know how much you have until the next SAAS pay day. Pretending not to know how much you don’t have is plain dangerous, and having a ‘fuck it’ moment like my friend will make your overdraft rise exponentially. Be honest! If you can’t control yourself, get your bank statements sent home instead of to your term address. They’ll be out of sight, out of mind, and right in the lap of your parents. And there’s nothing more frightening than that.

miss no moneypenny part two

Part two in my 2007 financial planning series.

Most of us like shopping. Some of us are darned good at it. Back dans le jour, when yuppyism was rife, it was imperative to be able to show off the trendiest brands and most expensive items to establish one’s status. Those who rode the wave of capitalist success were the icons of the Maggie era. This century is different. There is kudos for a good bargain. In the economy bumper-pack generation, we are Primark’s children. One in twenty adults on the brink of bankruptcy, daytime TV jampacked with adverts for consolidated loans, whole economies in trouble because of massive unsecured debts - there’s almost a pride in poverty these days, as long as you’re poor with style.

And that’s why it’s difficult being a student, because the old ‘Young Ones’ stereotype just doesn’t ring true anymore, and a Glasgow resident spends the second highest amount of money on average on clothes in the UK (it must be true, I read it in the Metro). Fact – we’re that good at shopping. But did you ever think to shop for money?

You need a student bank account. No arguments. That’s what they’re there for. But they’re a product, not a service, and the banks are vying for your custom and loyalty like any other business. Chances are, your local bank succeeded. It’s nearby, you had your kiddie saver account with them, and you’ll probably stay with them for life. That’s fair enough, but you could probably get yourself a much better deal. You just need to do a bit of bargain hunting.

Like I said before, you’re not looking for the fun stuff, so don’t be swayed by gimmicks. It’s like shopping for the perfect pair of jeans. The embroidery and details might be nice extras, but you’re looking for the best cut you can get. If you’re in the money and for some reason have few outgoing expenses, you want a high rate of interest. If not, you want the largest interest-free overdraft possible, with the least repercussions for going over it. Don’t worry about the graduate deals yet.

This year, Martin Lewis from MoneySavingExpert.com recommends HBOS, RBS and Natwest for student accounts and if there’s one thing you should take from this article, it’s to visit MoneySavingExpert.com. I can’t emphasise that one enough. But Lewis also recommends that you shop around, that you forget about money monogamy and tart about. Student deals change all the time so keep up to date. Even if you’re not a new student, and even if you have an overdraft, you can still switch student accounts. I must add however – do not, absolutely do not, open up more than one student account. You can open multiple bank accounts, but you cannot have more than one student overdraft.

Next issue I’ll argue that you should aim to finance your time at University without ever needing an overdraft, but even if you never actually need to use it, you need one to remain prepared, and it’s worth negotiating the biggest allowance available with your bank if you don’t automatically get it. Pay attention to what you’re being offered.

Martin Lewis expounds an interesting suggestion for student financing, which I wish I had tried, but secretly know I would have failed at. ‘Deficit banking’ involves moving your savings and as much of your overdraft as possible into a high interest savings account and living out of the bottom of your overdraft, transferring money from your savings as necessary. I will neither recommend nor discourage this, but I will suggest that this involves more careful planning and precarious financial balancing than most young people are prepared for (I’d love to hear from you if you’ve done this though).

Without patronising my readership, I’m aiming to give advice for watching your pennies without any effort. I know that very few students seem to want to be counting their beans and discussing percentages, but it’s worth it to ask your mates what deal they’re getting from the bank, and to find out which one’s guilty of fleecing students. Ask your bank questions now, before they start asking you questions, and you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

miss no moneypenny part one

Yeah, so I cheated this week. To ease myself back into working full-time, I've resurrected some old articles I wrote for my student magazine. When I graduated in 2007 I wrote some articles for the new intake of Freshers about financial planning, which is something I definitely didn't do when I was a Fresher. They are most definitely corny, and a bit out of date (this is pre-recession, remember!) but I thought I'd share them here so you'll get something every day this week. After that, I have some things up my sleeve, but I'll probably have to drop from five times a week to two or three times, depending on the work situation.

Here goes:

Hello all, my name is Miss NoMoneyPenny, and I’m your off-beat, out of tune financial advisor. I’m here to guide you kicking and screaming through your time as a sensible, thrifty student. Seeing as it’s Freshers’ Week, and you’ve got a whole host of other worries, such as what to wear out tonight, how to get off with the hot girl in the block across from you, and how the hell to find your lecture halls, I’m not going to talk about the boring stuff such as budgets and bank accounts. Hoorah.

I hope you’re sitting back and enjoying yourself so far, because the truth is, you’ve never been in such a good position, especially if you’re Scottish. The government has been so kind as to pay your tuition fees, offer you a nifty loan tied to inflation, and if you’re especially lucky, hand over a student bursary (this is actually a grant, and it’s worth applying for through SAAS to see if you get anything – hey, it’s free money!). And pending Mr Salmond being able to sweet talk the rest of Parliament, you’ll probably get through Uni without being stung by a two grand charge at the end of it.

So, life is sweet, and so is your money. And lots of companies have started to realise student buying power. That’s why you’ll probably suddenly find yourself absolutely irresistible to all sorts of branding and PR staff, especially while trying to wander up and down campus. A word of warning though – it’s not you those sweet, semi-naked PR girls want, it’s your money.

The student card is a passport to all sorts of cut-price goodies, and it’s definitely worth scoping out the best deals amongst all the flashy flyers you’ll have thrust at you. Some student offers worth mentioning are: Topshop and its sister brands (the discount, NOT the store card), Apple (iPods and Macbooks, not fruit), local greengrocer's (fruit, not iPods and Macbooks), the Student Railcard and the International Student Identity Card (ISIC). Even if somewhere doesn’t advertise a student discount do ask if they provide one, especially if you’re buying something pricey (like a computer) and especially if you’re paying with cash. Companies want brand loyalty as much as they want a quick sale, so often they’ll do anything to keep you sweet.

Don’t get taken in by every student offer available, because there are some that aren’t quite all they promise to be. I’m not just talking about the clubs in town that brag about bouncy castles, D-list celebs and fantastic (though illegal) drinks promos and then fail to deliver on the ‘bonanza’ (though they are bloody annoying). I’m talking about credit cards and store cards.

Credit card and money companies cottoned on to the fact that students love free stuff and they’ll take any old shit if they think it’s a good deal. A ConMe Credit Card with 85% APR? No thanks. What about if we throw in a free box of Candy Floss Makers we’ve had in the back store room for the past decade? Oh, well now you mention it…

Just don’t do it, okay? You. Do. Not. Need. A. Credit. Card. And you don’t need a TopShop shopping card, or a free popcorn machine, or a New Look card, or anything of the sort. There is a time and place for these things, and now is not it. Enjoy Freshers’ Week you lucky buggers, but if they approach you do what any self-respecting freeloading student does - take the free pen and run.