The Skinny Student Handbook 2012: An Introduction

Hey, student! Sorry about the slightly abrupt welcome, but that wasn’t us shouting at you in a cheery, hyped-up style, it was actually a reference to an early 80s post-punk band called The Fall. You won’t have heard of them because you’re a student, and are therefore a simpering teenager who’s too busy mucking about with traffic cones, drinking in the daytime, and describing things as ‘random’.

Or are you? You see, when we were putting this bad boy together we came to a realisation: rather than a homogenous mass of drones all sharing the same haircut, students are genuine, real people. With that in mind, this year’s Student Handbook has been designed to reflect exactly what we do on a month-in month-out basis, with a few extra student specials thrown in for good measure.

Our Music guide should prove equally helpful to the fresh-faced newcomers and all you final-year students desperately trying to keep up to speed while also having write dissertations. Our Clubs writers have banded together to plan out your entire week on the dancefloor, while Film editor Jamie presents your cinematic role models on whom to base your every move.

For the more practical among you, we talk to YouTuber Liam Dryden to find out how to get internet famous, profile some of the stranger student societies on offer across the country, go behind the curtain of one of the country’s oldest student theatre companies, and get the inside track on just what it takes to study abroad. Persistence and a love of interesting things and people, apparently.

As if all that wasn’t enough, we’ve put together comprehensive guides to the best student bars, cafes, venues, clubs, cinemas and galleries in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee. We’ve also had your horoscopes looked into for the coming year, cast our eye over the worlds of art school and the student paper, and even taken a look at student fashion. The fashions are modelled by cats. While we recognise that many of the student stereotypes are lazy, we double-checked the one about students’ love for hilarious pictures of cats, and it’s definitely true.

So there you are, an action-packed introduction to The Skinny which doubles as a handy primer for cultural and student life, whilst also finding time within its pages to dress up animals and start a civil war between Scotland’s art schools. Well you are genuine, real people, so we thought we’d give you some variety.