Earning money as a student
Bootlegging, escorting and scraping barnacles off boats; skint students will do anything for a bit of cash, as Condor Properties found out.
It's a familiar story; your student loan cleared a matter of weeks ago, but already your bank account looks like it’s in need of an EU bailout.
To get out of the red some will simply make a teary call to daddy, while other, less fortunate students, will have to roll their sleeves up and get to work. Waiting, bar work and shelf stacking are common jobs for hard up students, but, as Condor Properties found out, some go well beyond the call of duty to support themselves at uni.
“I was a male escort for a few months in my first year,” explained Andrew Gabet, a media student in Liverpool.
“I accompanied mature ladies to various events; the money was great and I had dinner and drinks paid for me.”
So did he offer any extras?
“No; of course not,” he smiled, unconvincingly.
Slightly less glamorous was James Andrew’s job. The psychology student had been studying at Cardiff, but moved back to his home town of Worcester over the holidays.
“I worked in a cake factory and for eight hours I had to stand there and watch this rubber tube to make sure it didn't get clogged up with sugar,” he told Condor Properties’ Cardiff branch.
“If it got blocked I had to whack it with a stick.”
Unfortunately, after two hours James nodded off because he was so bored.
“I woke up to the sound of my line manager shouting at me; the tube had got blocked and sugar was overflowing everywhere. None of the cakes had been sugared either so they had to reverse the production line – I was fired after four hours.”
If you thought that was bad, spare a thought for Matthew Beeby. He studied French at Exeter and had a part time job scraping barnacles off boats.
“It was grim,” he told the Exeter branch of Condor Properties.
“My boss was a complete arse and the job was mind numbingly boring. I was dreaming about barnacles; it nearly sent me insane.”
However, another student, who wanted to remain nameless, came up with a cunning, albeit illegal, plan to avoid hard labour.
“I cut vouchers out of my local paper and got cheap ferries to France with one of my mates,” he said.
“We loaded my car with booze and fags and sold them to other students on the campus. I had a Peugeot 205 at the time and we spent many a night kipping in the back of it in France, surrounded by cigarettes and alcohol.”
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