“Good things come in threes.”

Wrong.

A single pot of bat soup not only ruined third term and my birthday party, but most importantly rendered my third blog post of the year (what could’ve been a Mácha-like romantic poem about the blossoming Manchester in May or something super-duper artsy like that) truly ‘un-Pulitzer-worthy’. Well, unless they started giving awards for literary epics of arduous quests from the bed to the fridge, odes to boredom, or psychoanalytical poems about binge-watching IT Crowd for 9 hours straight (FYI: no they don’t – I just checked).

So what now? Well, I assume you’re probably sick and tired of quarantine stories (and I most certainly hope that’s the only thing you’ve been sick with lately), so I thought: “Oliver, please be responsible for once and do what’s actually expected of you: retrospectively evaluate your first year at university.”

That means it’s time for you to throw out all self-help books (paper waste collectors rejoice), as here are the top 5 skills that my first year at uni has taught me; skills that in fact are equally as useful for post-apocalyptic survival after all of humankind is inevitably wiped out for thinking they can outsmart social distancing and face masks (too soon?). Here we go:

1. Cooking. At first, you might practically pepper spray yourself when sautéing habanero peppers and nearly burn down your flat after toasting tortilla wraps, but hey, at least after 7 months you’ll be able to make world-class ramen (which is like the ultimate survival food anyways).

2. Autodidacticism. Please go to your 9 AM lectures! Unless it’s 9:32 already and you have no recollection of hitting the Snooze button 8 times. Yeah, in that case, you’ve got to be damn good at self-teaching – will be useful when you’ll need to learn to make fire, purify water, or survive dysentery.

3. Entrepreneurial attitude. Studying in an innovation-driven environment that’s at the edge of human knowledge and exploration, you’re bound to come up with many useful ideas and learn the key skill of discovering how to solve interesting problems. Apocalypse seems like a pretty major problem in itself, so at least you’ll know how to solve it, right?

4. Self-sufficiency. Moving from a high school where you know everyone and interact with people daily into a totally new country where you live completely on your own is awesome! If you’re particularly keen on occasional loneliness, that is. But at least when you’re literally the last survivor in the world, you won’t even need Wilson (á la Castaway), as you’ve become a truly self-reliant person, so that’s cool, eh?

5. Negotiation. “Hi dad, I overspent this month again. Could you possibly…?” is the embarassing call that most students don’t want but must make (not me, if you were wondering: I’d probably get slapped through the phone somehow). By successfully talking yourself out of this sticky situation you’ve suddenly developed hostage negotiator-level skills that will come in really handy in post-apocalyptic barter.

An older friend who has already graduated told me that leaving university and entering “the professional world” is similar to my antiutopian vision of the end of civilization… only if the apocalypse could somehow get even rougher. That means that although you can now successfully survive the majority of the end-of-world scenarios (AI revolution, a full-out nuclear war, plague, or an asteroid impact), but a single assessment center or case study interview will still leave you completely stumped. Back to uni to see through Year 2 it is!

…unless they cancel it again.