“The King’s Jester” is a satire column that Roar runs in collaboration with the KCL Comedy Club. If you’re interested in writing an article for this column, email your submission to or send it to @kclcomedyclub on Instagram.
A new study carried out by a psychology PhD student has revealed that War Studies students “really are just like that, I guess”. Sara Powley’s research, conducted primarily by listening to War Studies student’s views on current events, followed by harrowing accounts of the deeply confined childhood traumas that led them to do a War Studies degree, has revealed that, honestly, there’s no real reason why they all act like that, they just sort of do.
“I can’t believe I’m going to fail my thesis because of this”, said Powley, being interviewed. “I mean have you interacted with one of them? I was sure there would be something insane I could dig up for my thesis about them, but no. Nothing”. She then showed us her list of questions asked of each test subject; all questions seemed normal though, weirdly, every single one of them had left the question, “Is war bad?”, blank on their form.
We asked Oscar Neil, a first-year War Studies student and one of the study’s test subjects, for his views on this. After giving out to us for interrupting him from watching a four-hour long Twitch live stream of someone playing as Luxembourg in an obscure WW2 strategy game in the Maughan, he asked “why would there be something wrong? We’re just like any other department. Well, except that only one-in-four of us are women, but who really cares about that”.
Neil went on to explain that “basically, it’s a completely normal degree, and a useful one at that, unlike the useless psychology one that researcher is doing”, referring to Powley’s ongoing Doctorate in Psychology. “What would you even use that degree for? Therapy or something? Who needs that?” he said before telling us to leave him alone so that he could work on his essay about why European colonialism is a good thing, actually.
Powley, who we later found alone at the Vault, drinking to forget that one argument about Vladimir Putin she had to listen in on during a War Studies seminar she sat in on for research, claimed that “I was so sure this would work out. I mean this is a degree that everyone within King’s only knows as ‘history for incels’ and everyone outside of King’s knows as ‘what is that?’. I wish I never did this stupid PhD”, she said, downing yet another tequila and tonic, a depressing sight for the table of freshers next to her, looking into their own futures at KCL.
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