23 things only media students will understand

Media students have it pretty sweet. While the rest of us are clinging on to consciousness through endless all-nighters and painful essays, they’re cracking out the popcorn and watching the entire season of Breaking Bad purely for “research purposes”. We’re reading bland academic journals and rifling through infinite numbers of articles while they’re browsing copies of Empire simply to “explore the market”. They have it pretty darn easy, right?

WRONG!

Society has a really bad habit of discrediting Media students, labelling their specialisation as a “doss” subject, denying the field the academic validation this challenging subject well-and-truly deserves. If it was as easy as everyone likes to think, surely every student would pass with flying colours, and the world would have a new Hollywood blockbuster gracing its screens every other day…

It’s not all fun and games in the world of the Media scholar – and to make this point undeniably clear, here are 23 of the countless problems only media students can truly understand:

1. Being forced to cast friends and members of your family as lead roles in your film so you have a bigger budget to spend on necessities…like alcohol

Via Giphy.

2. And filming in every nook and cranny of your university campus to save money on travel and location so you could buy more alcohol…

Via Giphy.

3. Realising the world of Media is so broad that you have to reign yourself in from a full-blown mental breakdown when people ask: “So, what do you want to do after university?”…

Via Giphy.

4. When people insinuate that you chose an easy subject…

Via Giphy.

5. Having to sit through classes entirely dedicated to the world of Social Media…

Via Giphy.

6. Hearing everyone in your class call themselves either a ‘Director’, ‘Producer’, ‘Writer’, ‘Blogger’, ‘Vlogger’, ‘Youtuber’, ‘Photographer’ or a greedy cocktail of every discipline, while you struggle with the responsibilty of the simple term ‘Student’…

Via Giphy.

7. Hearing the words, “So all you have to do is watch films all day?”

Via Giphy.

8. Watching your chosen editing software grind to a halt before you had a chance to save the past eight hours of work…

Via Giphy.

9. The sound of any TV/Radio commercial jingle triggers instant analysis…

Via Giphy.

10. Realising it’s virtually impossible to critique a bad film without sounding utterly pretentious…

Via Giphy.

11. And having to watch every film and TV show on your own because normal people just can’t handle your constant media analysis…

Via Giphy.

12. Forgetting a shot from your storyboard and praying no one notices the clumsy stock sequence…

Via Giphy.

13. Worrying that designing your portfolio/website was the high point of your career, and that nothing in life will ever quite live up to that same level of happiness…

Via Giphy.

14. The same goes for when you write or publish something you know is absolutely stellar…

Via Giphy.

15. Your opinion of someone rests entirely on the quality of their favourite movie…

Via Giphy.

16. Spotting a continuity error in a film you used to respect…

Via Bhushanmahadani.

17. Desperately trying to find a good quality stream to watch the film before tomorrow’s lecture…

Via Giphy.

18. Several tripod-centered shots have caused a number of your projects to look like remakes of The Blair Witch Project…

Via Giphy.

19. The pain of taking on an unpaid internship…

Via Giphy.

20. Staying up to watch the Oscars with the threat of that 9am looming over your head…

Via Giphy.

21. The terror of being left alone with the most expensive equipment…

Via Memegenerator.

22. The pure shame of forgetting to remove the lens cap…

Via Giphy.

23. But even though it’s a tough old game in the competitive realm of media, you love your work so much that it doesn’t even feel like work, and that makes you one lucky media maverick!

Via Giphy.

Image via Shutterstock.

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