University is no place for creativity.

I am currently sat in the library procrastinating, something that has become quite a speciality of mine.

Its a habit that over the next few hours I am going to have to kick. I have so much to do and yet my brain hasn't seemed to notice. No matter how many to-do lists I stick around and no matter how many deadlines I scare myself with I just can't seem to gather together the necessary brain cells required to carry out the simplest of tasks.

I remember a time, long before University when I used to just sit at a computer for hours and just write. Whatever came into my head, articles, stories even scripts sometimes. This creative flair that I have always prided myself on has just gone.

It was my 'thing'. I could just knock out an amazing stories, bring my mother to tears with my powerful and beautiful words and I relished that. The way it was possible to make someone feel something so strongly with words and images that have come purely and organically from my own head. I then made the fatal decision to come to University.

I thought that getting a degree would give me some kind of recognition, that this talent that I had was somehow worthless to the world without a piece of paper that said 'YES, Emma-Jane Allen can write things that people will want to read.'

I have since found that University has done entirely the opposite. Instead of opening up a world that I was longing to enter, instead of enabling me to make a career out of what I see as my only true talent, it has made me really dislike it.

Its stripped all the passion and creativity I had and replaced it with resent and referencing. Over the past 2 and a half years I have slowly but surely given up on any dreams I had of becoming a successful writer, I have been crushed by assignment after assignment in which I have had little to no opportunity to display my creative skill. These assignments have, in turn taken up so much of my time that any extra curricular work that I might have produced has been squashed to one side.

I did know before I started university that it would be hard work and I'm not a person who is afraid of hard work. I was fully prepared to be staying up all night writing assignments and making them just right. What I wasn't prepared for however was the lack of creativity in an institute that apparently prides itself on extracting the full potential of all its students.

I also don't want you to think that this is simply a product of a girl who is failing because I'm not, in fact, I'm doing really rather well just not in the way I really wanted to be.

This is why I am now totally convinced that University is the worst route to take if you're interested in the creative industry. If you have a talent, a real talent, then work at it. Build your portfolio, send your work out to industry professionals and don't listen to the people that will tell you that you'll never get a decent job without a degree because if you work hard enough and you have a talent then there truly is no qualification on this planet that could give you better tools than you already have...your own creative brain.

I am slightly bitter, but only because it's taken me this long and thousands of £'s of debt to realise what was pretty obvious to begin with.

With this in mind I will definitely be writing more, forcing myself to produce more content for this sorry excuse for a blog. There will be many more litres of Cherry Coke consumed and many many more packets of extra strong mints devoured, my dentist won't be pleased but my brain will and when all is said and done, who really needs teeth? Look out...