Chicken wings and basic bitches: An Albany campus review

The Albany campus… the awkward third wheel of the Massey University ménage à trois.

You know you’re in for a wild ride when the highlight of your campus is a golden chicken wing statue. The majority of Albany’s student body consist of Aucklanders studying communications (who think they’re running their own business by joining a pyramid scheme) or Northlanders in Thrasher hoodies who think they’ve reached the big city.

Location wise, Massey Albany is in a prime spot near the Westfield mall, a myriad of local supermarkets and the Albany McDonald’s. This is great for those staying in student accommodation because it means you can pop over to the supermarket or, more importantly, go for 11pm trips to Kmart with relative ease. Not only that, you can still make it home in time to string up that line of fairy lights before your hook-up from the first floor is ready to come upstairs.

Speaking of halls, Albany accommodation has the weirdest cesspool of bogans and basic white girls because unlike most university halls which only take your standard first years, Albany accepts people of any age. I spent many nights witnessing men in their late twenties hitting on the barely legal seventeen-year-old freshers and trying to lure them into the apartments, which is an unfortunately frequent sight in Albany.

Party life on the Albany campus is scarce. If you’re in halls you can go to a few micromanaged parties in Te Rito but otherwise, your entire social life depends on ASA barbeques and hitting up Fergs on a Thursday night. Now I’ve never been one to hate on an ASA barbeque, but there have been very few this year due to lockdown which I find to be a heinous crime.

Fergs is probably the best thing about Albany campus and it hasn’t even been open half of this year. Now that it’s open again, we’re in that unfortunate time of the year when North Shore high schoolers are turning eighteen and thinking they’re the absolute shit because they were able to sink four vodka cruisers and still get in.

The ASA struggles to get students enthusiastic about anything and the smoking shelter behind the accommodation car park is probably the liveliest example of campus culture and comradery. There will always be someone there ready to skip class and if you can get past the fact that nearly all of the shelter walls have been broken or removed by drunken idiots, it’s a nice spot to hang out.

Foodwise, Scholars café is a godsend and quite possibly my favourite place on campus; however, to get there you have to make it past the Albany gym where the guy that hit on you while you were underage is snorting pre-workout powder – and some days that’s too much for even the greatest coffee enthusiast to endure.‍

Also, Albany students love to complain about Massive. It’s essentially a campus full of Karens coming back to pursue their love of Austen in my English Lit class (fair enough). After class, these lovely women stumble out of the Atrium only to find that lo-and-behold, the student magazine is plastered with images of some woman’s cleavage. They then write a strongly worded letter to the editor demanding that such PORNOGRAPHY never graces their Wholesome-Christian-Campus again.

And trust me, there is nothing more awkward than the looks ASA staff give me as I distribute yet another controversial magazine cover.

So, as I near the end of my third and final year of my undergraduate degree at Massey University’s Albany campus, I say farewell to the drunken nights spent mounting the chicken wing, the first year nights that I left Fergs thrilled to have pulled a second-year engineering student, or in tears when some skinny white boy I liked had gone home with the girl in the room next door to me.

Along the way I’ve spent way too much money at Kmart, attended some superb ASA Balls (thanks to 2018 ASA President, Jason Woodroofe, for reviving ASA Balls from the dead), and maybe even handed in a couple of assignments along the way. I’ve made lifelong friends who are now flatmates, learnt when a degree wasn’t right for me and worked a few jobs before landing this gig where I get paid to roast my university.

But for anyone that had me as an RA in 2019 – I’m so, so sorry.