Being woken in the middle of the night by an intruder skipping off with your tele is a prospect that terrifies many people. At 3am last Thursday I got the opportunity to experience this terrifying prospect first hand. Lucky me.

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In one of those gut-churningly scary moments my bedroom door swung open, waking me instantly and leaving me staring face-to-face with the opportunist thief. Normally in such a moment I would scream like a small girl and run-way. But this time, in a moment of adrenalin fuelled rage I leapt out of bed and screamed and waved my arms as manically as I could, and fortunately, the intruder ran away.

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However, prior to being chased out of the house by a semi-naked and half-asleep mad man the burglar had helped himself to just about everything of value from the ground floor of my house, which as I’m sure you can appreciate is a bit crap!

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In some ways we were lucky though: we didn’t lose that much. But students should beware, thieves target student houses. The prospect of an ill-defended house stashed full of shiny new laptops, tvs and mp3 players is just too tempting to Sheffield’s thieves.

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So, students should take some basic precautions to make their houses less advertising to potential burglars. They may seem obvious, but they didn’t to me until it was too late, so I’d guess that others often neglect them too:

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1. If you’ve got an alarm, use it!

2. Check the distance between your letterbox and the thumb-lock. If its shorter than an arm, get a letter box cage or similar.

3. Get a big bolt.

4. Check your windows are secure. If necessary ask your landlord for window locks.

5. Close the curtains at night.

6. Don’t leave valuables, such as laptops or wallets, visible through the windows.

7. If your house is going to be empty for a while consider getting some timer switches to turn lights on overnight.

8. Get a Kensington lock for your laptop.

9. Mark all your belongings with Uni Sheffield, your initials and your Ucard number either by etching or with a UV pen. This makes products more difficult for a thief to sell on and increases your chance of having your items recovered if they are stolen.

10. Don’t live in Broomhall. It’s popular with students for its close proximity to the university but it’s also the crime capital of Sheffield.

If you’ve ever wondered how academics pass the time during the long summer break the Times Higher Education Supplement has supplied the answer: they get together and ridicule their students hilarious attempts at exam answers.

Most are simply spelling errors resulting from either idiocy or a lack of proof reading. These include situations requiring “unpresidented” responses, “deftifying” leaps and “flirtation” making water safe to drink.

Others, however, warp reality and change the meaning of answers in some quite fantastic ways. There are dozens of these listed in the comment sections of the THES website, but they’re hidden amongst the many hundreds of comments from angry academics attacking the decline in academic standards and spelling abilities. To save you from being potentially exposed to the comments of these nasty academics, I’ve picked out the top-10 exam gaffes so you don’t have to:

1. Commenting on the rise of anti-Jewish sentiments in 20th century Germany one student wrote: “Antisemitism in Nazi Germany was difficult, especially for the Jews”.
2. Discussing Magaret Atwood’s novel another stated: “The Handmaid’s Tale shows how patriarchy treats women as escape goats”.
3. Still on literature a student confidently declares: “Beowulf is an anonymous medieval poem written in the 18th century by Robert Cotton”.
4. From the ever-exciting world of soil ecology: “Symbiosis may be defined as ‘living together’ in Greece.”
5. Staying with ecology: “Wood is difficult to decompose, because it is highly dignified”.
6. Moving swiftly on, in economics a student spends an entire essay referring to the “Keynesian theory of full unemployment”.
7. A budding sociologist on the causes and effects of the poverty cycle states: “The most influential aspect of poverty is the absence of marriage between parents, particularly mothers.”
8. A student attempts the most horrifically wrong sentence of all time by remarking: “The Egyptians built the Pyrenees, which were triangular shaped cubes.”
9. A tourism student confidently discusses the role of in flight staff: “Air stewardesses step into the role of portraying their front region, as the job requires them to.”
10. Last, but not least, yet another ecology blooper, Red deer, we learn “are native to Scotland and have long been cohabiting with man”.

Sheffield’s annual comedy festival – Grin Up North – taking place between 1^st and 16^th October is promising to be bigger than ever, and after my first glance at this year’s programme I’m inclined to agree.

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The festival seems to have the perfect balance of big names and new talent this year featuring several big names performing at either City Hall or the Lyceum including Rich Hall, Dylan Moran and Frankie Boyle and a number of less well known comedians performing almost nightly at the Lescar.

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But calm down kids! Before you get too excited this festival of comedic joy doesn’t come cheap. Some of the big name shows cost up to £20 a seat, and the average show costs nearly £12, meaning this October is likely to be a month of selective comedy thrills.

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Bearing this need for selectivity in mind I have a few tips for getting the most out of the festival:

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• Don’t bother seeing Jimmy Carr (4^th/5^th October, Oval Hall, £20). Despite the fact that he’s in your face on the tele practically every night anyway, his show consists of nothing more than a constant barrage of one liners which becomes rapidly dull and certainly doesn’t justify the £20 ticket price.

• Do go and see Michael McIntyre (8^th October, The Lyceum, £15). Yes he’s on the tele a fair bit as well, but McIntyre’s show is full of quick wit, hilarious audience interaction and some of the most energetically delivered gags you’re likely to encounter. Unlike Carr, definitely worth the money.

• Get yourself down to the Lescar (most nights, £8). Just because its cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be crap. Though notice my qualification there, because some inevitably will be. But certainly try to see the excellent Matt Blaize (9^th October), Robin Ince (12^th October) and Steve Hughes (16^th October) to name but a few.

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The lovely and helpful people at Sheffield University’s Biomedical Science Society have put up some hints and tips for new students coming to Sheffield on their fantastic new website, which are well worth a glance.

They’re obviously slightly skewed towards biomedical scientists but I think they broadly apply to all students, which is good because it allows me this opportunity to shamelessly plug their new website designed by my wonderful girlfriend, who also happens to be the society’s vice president.

Npower are an incompetent, inept and utterly useless company with approximately the same customer service abilities as a flock of mentally subnormal sheep.

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OK, rant mode on!

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So, as a new tenant I move into my student house on the 4^th July this year. I discover that Npower previously supplied the house, so for simplicities sake, stick with them.

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I phone them, they say some old accounts are open, but if I fax a tenancy agreement to them they’ll stop these and set me up a new account under all six of our names. I do this, and I naively think, ‘job done’.

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No chance. The house was previously rented as three flats, all occupied by utter eejits who never paid any bills. So they left without cancelling their accounts and owing Npower thousands of pounds. Thousands of pounds Npower then decided that we owed them!

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Bills and reminder letters kept arriving for the defunct accounts, all of which were returned with a “no longer at this address” note. After 4 weeks threatening letters from debt collection agencies began to arrive indicating that Npower would break into our house and disconnect if we didn’t pay. Once again I called Npower, and their debt collection agencies, and told them we were new tenants and faxed them yet another copy of our new tenancy agreement. Finally, job done?

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Not a hope! Yesterday they arrived to disconnect us, and finally Npower listened when I phoned them. I was transferred to someone in the “tenancy team” (where had this team been before?) who at least made it sound as though the problem was being solved. I say because he vaguely said that the letters “should” stop and that “hopefully” no one would turn up to disconnect us. I’m fairly certain this is not yet over!

The University of Sheffield Arts Tower courtesy of arepeejee. Go to flickr.com/photos/arepeejee to see more fantastic photos.

A blight on the skyline of Sheffield or one of the most elegant examples of a building of its style? Some students, like me, love it but most loath it.

Many students refer to it as the “faulty tower” and one staff member who teaches a class I attended in it goes as far as describing it as “a hideous, useless and appallingly designed monstrosity”.

The building undeniably has some serious faults, notably the almost complete lack of toilets apart from the basement floor, the dangerously narrow central column which leads to severe congestion and the single glazed windows which not only make it one of the country’s most energy inefficient buildings but also lead to a sensation that the entire building is about to collapse when the Sheffield weather turns nasty, something that has been known to happen ocassionally!

However, despite all its obvious faults, I like the building and I’m pleased that the university is going to invest £20 million refurbishing it to 21st century standards.

The arts tower in fact has a lot going for it. English heritage have described it as “one of the finest examples of functionalist architecture in the UK and one of the most elegant university buildings of it’s period”. So there!

Furthermore, the tower brings a small amount of fame to the University of Sheffield, firstly because it is the 41st tallest university building in the world, probably Sheffield’s highest world ranking, second because it is an exact half-size copy of Manhattan’s Seagram building, which is moderately famous making the Sheffield based miniature famous-ish by association and finally because it has probably the world’s largest surviving paternoster lift.

The paternoster is strangely loved by all new students, who regard it as some sort of educational roller-coaster. The excitement rapidly wears off once it becomes apparent that it takes about 10 minutes to travel the 78 metres from ground to 19th floor, but nevertheless it provides ample opportunity for slightly amusing Youtube clips, and if ever there was a better reason to preserve something..?

With nearly 50,000 students in Sheffield and the current generation of students supposedly the most Internet literate ever, where are all the student blogs?

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There are two major universities and several thousand students in Sheffield but an hour or so spent searching Google and Technorati’s blog search engines throws up very little. Sure, there are a few student blogs popping up around exam time, with a few posts of cathartic exam stress ranting and some university press release feeds, but no properly maintained blogs on the Sheffield student experience.

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It is bearing this heavy burden on my shoulders that I begin this blog, for now imaginatively titled ‘a Sheffield Student’. It won’t be a simple online diary, of the sort that gets updated everytime an essay deadline is near and prograstination is in order, but hopefully a more comprehensive site about life as a student in this fantastic city.

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However, given that I am a second year politics and international relations student at the University of Sheffield there will not only be an overwealming emphasis on the University of Sheffield to the detriment of Sheffield Hallam, but also quite a lot of outrageously geeky political stuff, for which I would like to apologise in advance.

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