Seminarses

Every Freshers’ week the newspapers and magazines dutifully trot out their stereotyped classifications of York’s students. Be you a Vanbrugh Nut or just simply a geek you will be justly labelled and lumped in with your kind. As first term draws to a close I would like to present a new method of classification with which to enrich your lives.

So here goes…

The Annoying People in Your Seminar:

1. The Tapper- So called because they spend entire seminars typing noisily on their laptops. This makes a ridiculous amount of noise which constantly draws attention to the fact that you are, silently or not, failing to take notes of any kind. Tappers are also guilty of arriving early in order to secure a seat close to the power point. Not a crime as such, until you realise that this same seat is also the furthest away from your tutor, meaning that you are forced to sit directly in their eye-line.

2. The Talker- Whilst I am aware that the very point of a seminar is to talk, there is an unspoken etiquette to such communication that Talkers decline to follow. Talkers can be subdivided as such:

The ‘Clever’ Talker – Possibly the worst of our annoying friends. Clever Talkers are especially upsetting because they don’t actually spend those two hours in AEW/004 spouting bullsh*t. Making you look bad in contrast. Constantly referring to the extra reading they’ve done and conducting multi-disciplinary thought makes them the enemy of most students.

The ‘Idiot’ Talker- These people think they embody the above but are wide off the mark. Will point out only the most obvious of ideas but so constantly that it leaves no room for your own brilliant ideas. Some Talkers will only speak if it means interrupting someone. In this case just stay silent and you sanity should be safe.

3. The Anecdotalist- Seems to think that despite the fact that you’re studying Eighteenth Century China or the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty that the activities of themselves and their friends are not only fantastically interesting but are also actually relevant to said discussion. They accompany these anecdotes with sideways glances, seemingly to check that you’re writing it down.

4. The Slacker- Although Vision sees nothing wrong with slackers per se, the annoying slacker is a very specific breed. The Slacker will turn up to your seminar sans books, sans pens and with only a crumpled up, four times folded piece of paper on which he has scrawled his requested responses to the text. He will then precede to read the two lines from his scrap, use a word you don’t understand and then shut up for the rest of the seminar.

Until Thursday these people were my enemies and many a happy aneurysm inducing hour was spent discussing just how annoying they all were. They might have been my friends outside of seminars but come 1.15 on Wednesday and they ceased to be Eleanor or John transforming instead into their hateable tapping, talking, anecdoting selves.

Then Thursday happened and the boy I had pithily labelled ‘Waistcoat Boy’ turned up without his waistcoat! Not only was he not wearing his personality defining garment but he was also wearing the same shoes as me. Brown, leather, brogues. Nothing wrong with brogues, brogues are a perfectly reasonable choice of footwear…for a boy.

And with that realisation I joined the club and resigned myself to being ‘the girl who wears man’s shoes’.