Queen’s Students Baffled by the Concept of Personal Hygiene and Demand Course on ’How to Cope with Adulting’.

By Flynn Nugent

Most would agree that university is where you learn to become a self-sufficient adult. However, a dissenting opinion has emerged through a collection of Reddit posts protesting the lack of courses in adulting at Queen’s. One user writes: ”I don’t know how we are expected to learn how to work a washing machine by ourselves, I think a module on Laundry would be beneficial for most people”. It’s not just laundry; you just need to take one look at a student house in the Holylands to realise that students struggle with just about every basic skill; from doing the dishes, to taking care of their personal hygiene.

A survey (Reddit poll) asked: ”Should QUB offer adulting modules such as ”Laundry”, ”Budgeting” and ”Personal Hygiene?”. 34% of people said ”Yes”, 21% of people said ”No” and concerningly 45% of people were not familiar with any of the terms used in the question. So why do Queen’s students lack knowledge on adulting?

We took to the streets to ask Queen’s students whether they shower at least once a day. A resounding 74% of people said no, with the most common reason being “can’t be arsed”. We also asked them what they spend most of their money on, to which the most common answer was ”alcohol”, closely followed by ”vapes”. It is therefore apparent that there is an element of laziness as well as incompetence, not surprising given that the average student sees a 9am lecture as optional but a ’piss up’ at 2am as mandatory.

We approached world-class researchers and experts on the subject of adulting (the parents of Queen’s students) and asked why they think that university students lack the skills required to be a fully-functioning adult. One parent said that their child is ”an angel”, that they are doing ”nothing wrong” and that we should ”leave them alone”. The interview was cut short when the parent received a phone call from their daughter asking for £200 for a night out. We observed that the parent instead sent her £500. When questioned on this point, the parent simply responded, ‘so she doesn’t have to ask again for a while.’

It seems like courses in adulting won’t be beneficial to Queen’s students as they simply don’t have what it takes to be an adult. It is time to face the facts: the current generation of Queen’s students are a generation of Peter Pans. Their demands for courses on adulting is an attempt to deflect the blame away from themselves. For just like in all their failed relationships; none of this is their fault.