A University Experience: Chapter 5 - Work

Introduction

Hello everyone!

Firstly, I'd like to apologise for the late upload. Yesterday I had one of those days where someone throws a spanner in the works and the whole day just gets away from you.

That didn't stop me from wanting to write my weekly uploads.

Now then, I've called this one Work. Why? Well, it's because work and (more importantly) earning money is a must when you are studying away from home.

Student Loans

I've spoken before about loans and if I repeat anything I've said before, it's to make sure that information is ingrained. I'll try to keep this short.

Student loans are not intended to cover every aspect of student living.

You have 2 types of student loan, or really I saw it as 2 categories within one loan. Tuition and Maintenance.

Tuition Loan

Tuition covers your course fees, which at the moment is averaging at around £9,250 per year. I should note that this does not cover any software or books you may need for the course. This is essentially covering the cost for Lecturers, the building you are sat inside and any equipment or information they may provide you with. Tutorials, lectures or seminars all fall under this bracket.

They pay this straight to the university, so you don't really have to worry about this unless the university comes to you saying they haven't received it.

Maintenance Loan

Maintenance loans are a little trickier to explain. Basically you can opt for a basic amount, which avoids the Student Finance Company looking at your parents bank account, or you can apply for more and they will work out a higher amount based on your parents income. It doesn't matter if you are legally an adult or have been working and earning for yourself up to this point. If you are going back into education or simply continuing, in their eyes you are a child. They mean it in the sense that because you are studying, you aren't in a job and need someone else to provide.

The idea of this type of loan is that you can use it to cover the costs of accommodation, food, travel, bills or resources you need for the course. The catch is, they aren't going to cover all of it.

In fact, with each year of study they are going to give you less.

Personally, I found that my maintenance loan didn't cover half of my accommodation. Leaving me to pay the remainder of the accommodation costs as well as any food, travel or learning resources / software packages out of my own pocket.

I had a conversation with my lecturer when the university had a licencing issue with Adobe packages. I was asked to use my own laptop and pay for the package using my maintenance loan. I had to tell her that I don't see a penny of it. From my perspective, the maintenance loan went into my account and back out again on the same day.

Paying it off

Before I go on and talk about ways of bridging the financial gap left by student loans, I want to discuss the misconceptions around how much you are actually paying back.

Most people shy away from studying at university because of the fees and the fact you'll be paying back for the rest of your life. Student Finance England recently went as far as to increase the amount of years you pay back for and making people with a lower income pay back the loans.

The reality of the situation is that regardless of how much you earn within their bracket, you pay back 9% of your wages. It actually comes out of your pay packet like a PAYE tax (pay as you earn).

It's up to you if you want to pay off a chunk of the loan. Otherwise, they will keep taking their 9% until your debt is paid off or you reach an age that they have declared you will stop paying back.

The Student Struggle

I tried to get a job while studying in Liverpool time and time again. I applied to companies where I knew the employees, I applied to places with "Urgent Hire" signs on the door. I even tried offering companies a free week's work so they could see if I was a good fit. They wouldn't even take me up for that.

It's not like I had a bad reputation or an infrequent job history. I have a solid work history, references that I had on speed dial for the day and I was available to work any hours they needed. The issue I had was the student ID I had in my pocket.

When you say "student", they see someone that is going to head home for the holidays, abandoning them at their busiest times of the year. Someone that might put their coursework before their next shift. That might not be you at all, but that is all they are seeing.

I was lucky in that my reputation for working at Sainsbury's was enough to get rehired every time I came back for the holidays. The store had actually done away with student contracts, so I had to sit through a bit of training each time and then it was back to normal. The first time, I came back for Christmas and thought to myself that I better take a back seat and let my colleagues tell me what to do as the department had a new manager and they would have changed a couple of roles around to cover staff that had left. Instead, it went back to the old ways and I was helping organise the department. The first time I met the new manager, he saw me telling someone to check the promotional ends for something.

I wasn't sure how he'd respond to seeing that, I was actually kind of nervous because you do get management that like things done their way or want to set the rules so to speak. He just smiled, shook my hand and said "So you're Adam...".

My point is that working a temp job during the holidays is probably the best thing you can do as a student. They need staff that will do long hours, take up overtime like it's going out of fashion and then you get to go back to university with almost enough money to see you through the next term. It's the one time of year that companies don't much care about your student status because they're kind of counting on you applying to that job.

At one point, I did work for a game testing company while studying in Liverpool. I may have left out the fact I was a student, though an employee of theirs that gave me a reference happened to be in my class. My thinking was that I could work there during the holidays and just leave when term started again. This worked in my favour because they now have a performance record for me in their system and would be more likely to rehire based on the fact I wouldn't need a whole day of training to get back behind a computer.

I did just that and left mid-September to continue my studies. I do know someone that stayed on as a student and used their holiday allowance to take a couple of days off a week, allowing him to keep the full time job going for longer.

Another option is to take up a food delivery role with companies like Uber Eats, Just Eat or Deliveroo. You pick your own hours, busiest times are lunch and evenings which works out well for a student and the money is good enough to get a meal or 2 out of it.

Thanks for reading this far, it means a lot.

Feel free to take a look at another blog post or maybe some of my 3D artwork.

See you next time.