There was an added pressure during my second year of university; now I was no longer a bewildered fresher, I was somehow expected to know what I wanted to do after graduating. Part of this process was the frantic applying to summer internship schemes. Or at least for my friends it was, as in my usual fashion of attempting to avoid all adult responsibility, I neglected to do this. The most I had done was to book festival tickets. I was then made to feel incredibly inferior by said friends who seemed to have their lives sorted- they’d completed applications throughout the year and would now spend their summers becoming journalists, lawyers and investment bankers.

When summer came around I panicked, realising I did need some sort of work experience that would add to my (pretty barren) CV and maybe give me some sort of clue as to what I wanted to do after university. A month into my vacation I happened to stumble on some last minute opportunities at a well known publishing house. I have never felt particularly inspired by the world of publishing, but thought I would have nothing to lose by submitting an application. I was offered 2 weeks unpaid work experience in the publicity department, and I was pretty happy about it. Despite being rather disorganised when it came to my post-Oxford career, I had managed to secure an opportunity that I thought I could gain valuable skills from.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite how it panned out. They probably could have trained a monkey to do my job – all I did from 9 to 5 was put books and press releases in jiffy bags, stick on address labels, and take the packages to the post room. A particular highlight was spending an afternoon putting “signed copy” stickers on to 500 books. People I talked to who were doing work experience in other departments had it worse – they had already graduated and were in disbelief that this was how their degree was being put to use.

What was exasperating was that the publishing house really did need our help. These tasks may have been mindless, but they were necessary. Having work experience candidates meant that the departments were run more efficiently, as the full-time employees weren’t bogged down with these menial jobs, so were able to get on with other more important things. Better still, they were getting this service at the price of just £2.00 for lunch each day and travel expenses (which they still haven’t bothered to pay me back). My experience wasn’t unique, but it also wasn’t the worst. Friends of mine have provided invaluable help for large companies over the summer without seeing any financial reward.

In the grand scheme of things, I was actually pretty fortunate in that this was only a couple of weeks work experience, and I was able to shoulder the costs. However, longer unpaid internships are plaguing a graduate labour market where there are too many worthy candidates and not enough jobs to accommodate them. Candidates are stuck between a rock and a hard place in needing experience to get experience, and for the most part it seems that unpaid internships are the only solution. This system is then incredibly discriminatory against those who are unable to afford to work for free.

Frustratingly, it doesn’t have to be like this. I spoke to Sabina Usher, Marketing Manager at Instant Impact; an intern recruitment company that connects students and graduates with SMEs and only offers paid internships.

“Interns deserve to be paid under NMW legislation if they have a set role, are doing set tasks and have set hours. All our internships are paid to reflect the hard work that these interns do and in turn, employers have access to wider talent and a productive recruit who is likely to stick around for longer”

More needs to be done to raise awareness surrounding this issue. To ask students or graduates to work for up to a year without pay is simply no longer acceptable. The problem lies in awareness and enforcement – although the government has proposed to ban the advertisement of unpaid internships, it would appear the campaign has ground to a halt. Many companies, as well as students, are unaware that most unpaid internships are in violation of National Minimum Wage legislation. It is the responsibility of the government and HMRC to enforce stricter legislation and regulation.

It is reassuring that when I do finally graduate and figure out what career is for me, I have the option of finding an internship that is both mentally stimulating and financially rewarding. It does not have to be like this.

In the past couple of weeks we have witnessed a tremendous tightening of the race for OUSU President, with Alex Bartram slipping into something similar to pole position following a series of blunders by his closest rival.

Ignoring the faults with their website and other campaign mistakes, Jane4Change seem, superficially, to be the best prepared team. But that is undermined by the fact that Jane4Change’s campaign is centred on a flawed policy, one which hasn’t exactly set the student body alight during hustings. The ‘student hub’ seems to be dead-weight and the team would be well advised to start focusing on things that are more important to the average OUSU voter (who is likely to care, primarily, about fees, accommodation and welfare). With OULC somewhat divided, the activist base that was once presumed to be a given is somewhat weakened, but Jane4Change must expect to have the highest number of doorknockers and, without them, their campaign is very much on the rocks.

Team Alex have done an excellent job of manouvering their campaign into a politically neutral zone. Lead agent David Bagg is no stranger to the machinations of OUSU elections and has rigorously upheld the rules (perhaps helped by his friendship with returning officer Nick Cooper) leading to a situation where Team Alex appears to have run the cleanest, and slickest, of the OUSU campaigns. What Team Alex still lacks, however, are a cogent set of policies to bring to the doorstep. Exam feedback is a lost cause and the rest of their policies can be seen as a little tokenistic, meaning that, like Jane, he needs to narrow his campaigning focus to the prime concerns of the average voter. Bartram needs to be able to get a lot of people out and about over the next few days, because his strong current position could still be undermined by lack of activists.

Nathan Akehurst and his team have pitched a gazebo in Radcliffe Square for the past few days, in a move that is reminiscent of the crazy old days of party political campaigning. Subtle treating and tackly t-shirts aside, Reclaim OUSU appears to be struggling to attract a broader student base. Their primary policies are far too dry for the average student, who isn’t going to sit down for a few minutes to find out what exactly a ‘general assembly’ entails. Their fining policy, on the other hand, is a genuine people pleaser and something they need to push on the doorsteps. The focus of the next few days, therefore, ought to be on getting a high turnout for its part-time exec, student trustee and NUS delegate candidates. There are elections to be won there, whereas the sabbatical positions already seem like a lost cause.

The real surprise has been the emergence of Louis J Trup as a serious candidate. After weeks of self-promotion via so-so humour, LJT has stepped out in The OxStu and declared himself to be a realistic antidote to OUSU hacks. It’s a somewhat dubious declaration and one that is build on the foundation of being a joke candidate. Many of his ‘real’ policies are among the most reasonable and well thought out of any candidate, but his decision not to run as a serious candidate from the start has undermined his credibility. LJT has manipulated the Oxford electorate in a more cynical way than any of the conventional ‘hacks’, but if his voters don’t recognise that, he looks on course to take a few hundred votes.  Provided, of course, he can get people to turn out which, without any activists to speak of, might be a stretch.

Ultimately, the election will be decided by which slate can get the most people to knock on your doors and drag you to your computer. The top job is a straight fight between Cahill and Bartram that gets bitterer by the day, and it’s not at all clear who’s going to win. Both teams have policy problems, but the organisational problems within the Jane4Change hierarchy could tip the scales in Bartram’s favour. Unless, that is, there’s a heavy turn-out by Labour supporting leafleters, in which case it’s still hers to lose.

I’ve been a member of the University of Oxford for 6 terms and 6 weeks. During that time I’ve seen the £9k freshers arrive, complained about the inordinate number of three course dinners, ignored two boat race victories, failed to be elected JCR VP, and watched three different OUSU Presidents come along. And through the incredibly varied experiences of Oxford, there has always been one constant: what does OUSU do and why should we care?

And why should we? OUSU has little to no impact on our lives as students. Its offices are hidden away behind the Combibos garbage, and the only interaction it has with most students is a weekly spam email. Not to mention that it sounds more like a crew date venue than a student union.

So we are left in a place where most people A) don’t care about OUSU, and B) think it does nothing. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the OUSU elections stir up all those inevitable feelings about our student representatives.

If you genuinely don’t care about the student union, then don’t vote. Your right to be apathetic is just that: a right. Turnout for our elections is, generally, abysmal, not because we’re a bunch of uninterested, Russell Brand acolytes who can’t think clearly enough – or operate a computer – to actually vote for a candidate, but because we work hard and think independently, and our independent thought often makes it difficult to join a ‘group’ of thinkers.

So the consequence is that most of you won’t vote and I don’t blame you. But I will vote, because I’ve come to weirdly care about OUSU. I don’t know if it was Martha Mackenzie’s emails, which I automatically binned in my first year, or DJT’s Wolverinesque mutton chops (and bizarre insistence on remembering the ‘J’ in any newspaper reference to him), but I find myself genuinely caring, and worried, about the result of this election.

First things first, Alex Bartram is not a bad candidate and we would by no means be damaging ourselves if we elected him. Likewise, I think it’s fantastic that Nathan Akehurst has managed to organise a proper left-wing slate, and many of the issues that he highlights are things that I wish were brought up more often. But their campaigns are fixed on the trite adage of ‘OUSU doesn’t connect with the people’, which is boring and repetitious. If they really thought that nobody cares about OUSU, they wouldn’t be running for President. In the same way that I didn’t bother going to my Oliver Wyman numeracy test this morning; if they felt that OUSU wasn’t an effective employer, they wouldn’t be applying to work there.

Jane Cahill’s campaign has hit road bump after road bump, and the undercarriage of their election vehicle is hanging by a thread. But stupid electoral marketing shouldn’t make a difference to your choice of OUSU President. Frankly, I could find out that the entire OUSU website had been plagiarised from Facebook and it wouldn’t make a piss-inch of difference to the way I think. 

Jane4Change are calling for the student union to have a bigger impact on student lives, not by undermining its previous achievements because they ‘don’t care’, but by developing it into something more accessible to the average student.

If you try and pop in for a drink at the OUSU offices on Wellington Square at the moment, you’ll be greeted by a stern receptionist and the disapproving, albeit moustachioed, face of Tom Rutland. If you try and organise a society meeting on their premises, you better pray your society is about as popular Lonely Nerd Soc, because there is about 20 cubic inches of conference space available. Jane is going to start the process towards a proper student union building, with cheaper drinks than the Purtle Turtle and more bureaucratic looking corridors than the SSL.

Yes, they’re student politicians (a weird charge to level against them in a student political election) and yes, James Blythe does look like he’s involved in a body-swap comedy with Peter O’Toole, but their vision for OUSU involves building on an existing infrastructure. And if you think that existing infrastructure is insufficient, then you’re probably just not understanding the difficulty of being an effective student union at a collegiate university. It’s fucking hard.

Voting in the OUSU elections is about as exciting (and difficult) as shopping at Ocado. About 25% of the student body will probably just ‘forget’ to vote, whilst another 25% are probably too wrapped up in their three-piece management consultancy circle jerk to bother worrying about ‘that ouzo thing’.

But if you’re someone who has the required two minutes to vote, and vaguely cares about the way we’re campaigned for, then I’d like to recommend voting for Jane Cahill. Her campaign management might make you think that she’s about as transparent as a piece of felt, but she’s the only candidate who talks in positive terms about what we can achieve at OUSU, and that’s the least disingenuous way of approaching a student union that suffers from a chronic lack of involvement.

It’s not cool to like OUSU (hence why I was accused of ‘rimming’ them) and I’m sure that, if I post this on my Facebook, I’ll get the usual barrage of ‘nobody cares!’, ‘*yawn*’, and ‘fuck off Nick u stupid hacking cunt’, but I feel like it’s worth writing anyway.

Even though I’ll be gone – unless you give me a Masters (please give me a Masters) – I still find myself, somewhat inexplicably, caring who becomes President of our student union.

Nick Hilton,

Editor of Cherwell and President of Lonely Nerd Soc

Every college has its dirty little secret. Normally tucked away at the far end of the furthest quad, you can see across Oxford the respective mistakes of colleges’ loony forebears in the 1960s. “Good joke, guys” would be my initial reaction to most of them if I did not have to live in one of their number. It was quite something, arriving at a stunningly beautiful (ok, moderately stunningly beautiful) college, a key factor in my choice of college, to be presented with the keys to Staircase 4. The looks of sympathy I got on arrival were an indicator of things to come. A spiral staircase, a Soviet-esque roof suitable for the handover of spies and another spiral staircase later, I was in my room and pleasantly surprised that at least it was marginally less prison-like in its decor than the hallway. Perhaps the most depressing aspect was that it does not have the modcons one would expect a modern building to possess: the hot water, when not coloured red by what I presume is rust, is freezing cold. It is another two spiral staircases, hard enough to navigate whilst sober, to get to the two loos for fifteen people. Indeed, in my freshers meeting with the College President, he was most enthused when he mentioned knocking the entire monstrosity down. It does, after all, ruin the so-called ‘architectural integrity’ of the place. 

In a desperate attempt to see the positive side of all this, I will now try to justify why these 1960s monstrosities, from St John’s infamous Beehive building to my very own, humble Staircase 4, add to the richness and diversity of Oxford Life. The first point to make is that it could be seen as a massive group-bonding exercise. Whilst we are all admittedly suffering, at least we can find mutual consolation in the fact that we are all suffering together. In fresher’s week, once the usual subject-staircase-place of origin formula was used up, we filled those awkward pauses with endless moaning about the hot water system or the paucity of loos. It was, to use that ghastly phrase, what one would call an ‘ice-breaker’. 

These 1960s monstrosities are also a vital component in the overall architectural character of the place. For, without them, Oxford would be dull in its uniform beauty. The monstrosities fulfil an important function; by breaking up the homogenous architectural experience, they render the 16th century turrets and stain-glass windows all the more impressive by virtue of comparison. Indeed, I appreciate the beauty of the view outside my window all the more by the relative hideousness of the building in which I am sitting. (Incidentally, one of the great bonuses of living in one of these 1960s buildings is that you do not have to look at them.) Furthermore, they are proof that Oxford is a living, breathing city. It is very easy to see Oxford as a city of the past, a monument to the nation’s heritage. Yet, it is easy to forget that it remains an active institution, filled to the brim with young people and a sprinkling of academics. The disconnect between the two is bridged by the less tasteful elements of the city’s past and, indeed, such elements showcase the full range of the city’s history, in a way that the orthodox beauty of traditional Oxford cannot. On the same train of thought, the architectural imperfections of Oxford make Oxford seem just a little less daunting and more welcoming to timid freshers who descend upon this alien city. 

Several of my fellow inmates, and independently of each other, came up with the following interesting psychological angle: living in architectural-hell in your first year means that your second year accomodation will nearly always prove a step up. It is a natural progression in many colleges to go from shoddy building in the first year to beautiful, stereotypical Oxford building in the second – although perhaps this does not apply to St Catz. Not only does this transition make you appreciate the second year accommodation to a much greater extent, but it also makes the burden of first year accommodation all the more bearable.

So, next time you bemoan the poor architectural choices of your respective colleges, remember that they, as much as the ancient quads, are part-and-parcel of the Oxford experience, and, most likely, where some of your best memories of Oxford will be made. And even after a few weeks, the sharp edges of Staircase 4 are beginning to grow on me – It is home after all.

The boys in military uniform, the saluting, the marching. The waving of our nation’s flag as if it justifies the deaths we are here to remember. The proud brandishing of guns; the very machinery that causes the destruction we mourn over. Poppy day isn’t about remembrance, it’s about glorifying the bravado that killed, and continues to kill, many.

Remembrance services are inextricably linked to the automatic respect and glorification of the armed forces, with more time given to military parades than reflection on those who have died. Our natural human empathy towards those who have suffered from war is manipulated in order to brand our foreign policy as worthy and heroic. Of course, at times, soldiers have been vital for the protection of our country, but we must be careful that Remembrance Day avoids using past battles to justify current policy. We cannot use the fight against Nazism to achieve public justification of Britain’s part in conflicts today.

In Flanders Fields, read to schoolchildren across the country, exemplifies the propaganda we face each November. It is significant that Remembrance Day has adopted McCrae’s poem, written early in WWI before the true horrors of war were revealed, since the campaign is desperate to romanticise and glorify the grim reality of war. ‘Take up our quarrel with the foe,’ reads the poem, echoing in services across the country. If Remembrance Day truly respected those who have lost their lives in war, it would surrender this bloodthirsty rhetoric and military propaganda.

But the military propaganda isn’t limited to the annual ritual of Remembrance Day. Organisations like Help for Heroes blindly label soldiers as heroes, whilst they fight wars that public polls continually express overwhelming opposition to. How can a hero die fighting an unheroic cause? Help for Heroes aims to care for serviceman and their families, compensating for the government’s continued neglect of the armed forces. Yet these campaigns rely on nationalistic rhetoric of heroes and protectionism, in order to care for serviceman, only serving to increase public backing of otherwise unjust and unpopular conflicts.

To blindly honour any armed forces, no matter their actions or purpose, is dangerous. We need to be free to support and protect ex-serviceman without glorifying the forces that continue to cause such widespread death and destruction. Remembrance Day stops us from doing this – it ties the memory of individuals killed by war with the groups that continue to perpetuate conflicts today. On Remembrance Day we should be remembering people who have suffered, yet we allow the campaign to manipulate our empathy into something more nationalistic, antagonistic and dangerous, lending itself to xenophobia and racism. The Daily Mail recently published an article challenging Muslim women to prove their patriotism by wearing a poppy, and it is exactly this pseudo-patriotism that has no role in an event to remember those who have lost their lives.

Perhaps more important is that Remembrance Day has been hijacked by the armed forces to the exclusion of the other victims of war. The Poppy Campaign raises funds for ex-Serviceman and their families, organised by the Royal British Legion and the Haig fund. Central to this is the memory of soldiers who have died in wars past and present. Not just soldiers, but exclusively British soldiers – as if war is not an evil that affects all sides, but an evil that is unique to Britain. Innocent civilians are forgotten – no poppies are worn in their memory, no services held, no poems recited. This is especially surprising considering that over 90% of the victims of modern warfare are non-combatants. Look at the Iraq war, where the death toll of over 120,000 civilians towers above the 5,000 occupying troop who have lost their lives. Yet on Remembrance Day it is clear that we believe it is only the British soldiers who deserve our memory.

Currently all that decides if we mourn the soldiers of the two world wars is their birthplace – after all, both German and British soldiers were separated only by borders – often both conscribed, and equally disillusioned with the war they fought. Today it is bizarre that we exclusively remember those who died in British uniform – the rhetoric of ‘protecting our nation,’ seems hollow considering the public’s opposition to recent foreign policy. On the one day we set aside to reflect, we continue to cling to the tribal mentality of remembering the soldiers who died on ‘our’ side and not ‘theirs.’ Has death and destruction not taught us that it is the loss of human life which is to be mourned, not just the loss of a national?

It is for these reasons that the White Poppy campaign is growing – a symbol for the memory of all who have suffered and continue to suffer, united in the shared belief in peace. It remembers the victims of war regardless of their army, their nation or their cause, because it doesn’t have the arrogance to assume that the British cause is any better than the cause of anybody else. It remembers those who brandished guns as well as those who refused to fight. It remembers the Iraqis as well as the British soldier. In short, it remembers victims of war because they were human, not just because they were soldiers.

It’s often said that since soldiers ‘give their lives for us,’ we have a duty to participate in Remembrance Services. Yet the greatest insult to their memory isn’t to object to the ritual military propaganda of Remembrance Day, it is to ignore their experiences. To claim that their death was tragic, but not tragic enough to stop the glorification of war and start the campaign for peace. It is an insult to allow their memorial services to be hijacked by the armed forces, who continue to cause the death and destruction we mourn over. Instead we must put remembrance back at the heart of Remembrance Day, and ensure that it is a positive force for peace in the future, and not for the maintenance of militarism, chauvinism and war.