Arts Students – Everything You Need To Know About Being One

Arts students have a reputation of being extremely chillaxed (a blend of chilled and relaxed), partly due to their high consumption of alcohol and ‘other enlivening things’ but also because they sleep. A LOT. Their tendency to sleep a lot means that attend class little.

A typical Arts student doing what they do best

When they do “rock up to class” (a term used by Arts students), they study subjects such as “Art, Blasphemy and Porn”, “Feminism”, “Film Noir” and “Cultural Politics and Everyday Life”. They believe that these things matter and their knowledge of them will help improve society. Arts students best friends are Karl Marx, Georges Méliès, Proust, Gandhi and Bob Marley.

Arts students are lovers of general knowledge. They are the ones at house parties wearing a knitted jumper and Doc Martins, reeling off random facts that they somehow manage to make seem relevant to a completely unrelated conversation. They do all this and still manage to emit the “cool” vibe. It’s a mystery as to how Arts students know so many random things (and also how they manage to seem cool).

Arts students enjoy being alternative (all of them that is), which they display via an ‘individual’ dress sense (usually the vintage, retro or nerdy look). They enjoy wearing things that look arty but serve no purpose, like badges, glasses without lenses and scarfs in the hot weather. Arts students dig nerds, girls with fringes and tall lanky boys. Wild haircuts in extravagant colours are optional.

USyd O-Week Arts students

Arts students know a lot of words, or at least appear to. They enjoy impressing people with words that are over eight letters long like ‘totalitarianism’, ‘semiotics’, ‘onomatopoeia’ and ‘contextualisation’. They throw these in their essays at least once every paragraph, sometimes without fully knowing what they mean. Arts students sign up for three years of writing essays and reading books they could have read in their own time. These three years usually snowball into five because Arts students tend to fail subjects, take GAP years and travel. At the completion of their three (became five) year degree, Arts students aren’t qualified to be anything in particular. They don’t mind though. They like the “skills” they acquired from their degree, such as research skills, analytical skills and communication skills, all of which are also taught in every other degree. It is for this reason that Facebook group The awkwardness when an Arts student talks about their “future prospects” has over 55,000 fans.

This is the Facebook group’s interpretation of the stereotypical Arts student. Hm...

An Arts Degree is ranked 47th in “Stuff White People Like” by Christian Lander, a New York Times bestseller. So it’s no surprise that most Arts students are Caucasian. It may be a surprise however, that female Arts students are the most sexually active out of all university students, as shown by Australian research published in the journal Sexual Health (probably don’t share this with your parents if you want to be an Arts student).

Arts students are cheap. You will often hear Arts students complain of having no money, right before they buy several bags of goon (cheap cask wine). Did I mention they drink? Their bank accounts aren’t nourished by the fact that Arts students tend to work in low paying hospitality jobs and enjoy nothing more than working for charity (a part from maybe telling people they work for charity).

Things Arts students do not like include: consumerism, noisy school children, 9am lectures and paying full price for things.

This is a stereotype, of course, but it helps to explain the look on people’s faces when you tell them you study Arts. I should know; I’m an Arts student.