Ally McBeal and the Insecurity of UCL's Student Body

Image Courtesy: 20th Century Fox

I recently started watching Ally McBeal. It’s not new, trendy or particularly clickable. However, it does say a lot about the insecure culture of high achievers.

Working at a law firm with her former university peers, McBeal’s professional integrity is questioned by everyone, from her secretary to the ex-boyfriend come legal partner she’s forced to work in proximity with. As UCL students we have a reputation which precedes us, but in the short term the pressure seems to have created a fragmented, frantic and quite frankly, flat student body.

We don’t talk to new people at bars, we share tables without saying hello, we don’t even know the names of everyone in our class. The ripple of this affects loneliness, with reportedly 92% of students suffering from it in a government report last year. In short, we have all the formality of a law office, but we’ve grown up way too fast. I think Ally McBeal should serve as a reminder, that the transition into university life should not be a transition out of yourself. In fact, if messiness was not a massive faux par, laughed off with chagrin in the Student Centre or in corridors of every department, maybe everyone would be a little less stressed.

After all, if the impossible reading list will always hang over us, maybe we should start doing what Ally McBeal does and kicking back in the evening, every evening. There are plenty of societies and just as many excuses not to attend them, but perhaps our insatiable career focus can be put on hold to go dancing once a week.

It’s no surprise that our post-grad stats are golden, with facts like winning 1st in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024 plastered everywhere, but I believe in self-fulfilling prophecies. These are beliefs one holds in hope, while inadvertently or without even realising putting in all the work to achieve them. Then we act shocked when we get it, it’s a reductive process in terms of personal agency.

A 90s show has taught me that upon coming to university as academic weapons, we lower our seemingly inadequate spears as the whole wide world seems to be standing against us. Moreover, a constant centre – the supposedly stable foundation of UCL itself – literally does not have the resource to accommodate all its students on its own turf. This year, I have more lectures in Birkbeck than on campus.

So maybe, it would be advisable to act a little more like Ally McBeal. Everyone is insecure, subjected to constant change and victim to our transitionary state somewhere between school and a career. We have a whole year and hopefully by the end of it journalists won’t be reporting on the insecurity culture we carry around like another lanyard. We don’t need this to gain entry into our community, we just need to embrace it with a little less trepidation. The alternative? Ending up as The Biscuit.