How to not get mugged as a student

With rising crime rates, high schoolers have emerged as the leading victims of muggings in our dimly lit streets. Chronic Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and a startling lack of street-smartness have been cited as primary reasons for this crisis. Thankfully, studies conducted by the University of Hard Knocks have made ground-breaking progress in preparing students against this rising threat. Here are their findings.

"An often-overlooked aspect is body language," says head researcher and first-year student Kuddus Kareem. "High schoolers are targeted because they look like bundled masses of insecurity. They need to walk the roads with longer strides, appear more confident, and man up! So long as they look like nerds, they're easy pickings for robbers."

Of the 67 times Kuddus has been mugged over the past three months, he claims 66 were intentional, and "totally, definitely for research purposes".

Kuddus mentioned that a general rule of thumb is to avoid crowds, as it's easy for muggers to confront and pressure you in a crowd into giving up your valuables in plain sight. Most bystanders won't feel the need to rush to a stranger's defence.

Additionally, he also said that walking home alone from a coaching at 9:30 PM through neighbourhoods plagued by load-shedding is also not advisable. When confronted about the paradoxical nature of his advice, he gave a look that betrayed confusion, and promptly dismissed the point.

Some common errors made by students include obeying the person beckoning you over from a narrow, secluded alleyway instead of sprinting in the opposite direction. Another one was dressing up in expensive, overly stylish clothing. It tends to be a dead giveaway that you probably don't use a Knockia 105.

 "Even if skin tight jeans are back in vogue, the pocket makes a perfect outline of your overpriced phone's six-inch display, and that's disadvantageous," commented Kuddus, drawing from his own experience.

To test these hypotheses, the team armed an anonymous student with the knowledge of their findings, and set him out into the streets. Throughout the week, he was mugged once, but evaded mugging attempts twice across numerous trips to and from coaching centres. The researchers seemed proud of the experiment's 67 percent success rate, despite a sample size of just one. One major point they emphasised was that due to the humiliation associated with such incidents, students with little real-life experience can't fully process such events. As a result, reaching out to friends or family for support becomes difficult.

"Perhaps by treating such situations with care, and destigmatising them by making light of them with humour or treating them like common, normal occurrences, could greatly aid victims," said Kuddus. This analysis was startlingly insightful as opposed to the rest of the logical gaps and insubstantial evidence in the study.

"You know what, this was a complete waste of time!" exclaimed the head researcher. "Getting mugged is inevitable, and touching grass is overrated, anyway. Just stay put at home. Join a voice chat, and get recordings of your classes. Maybe occasionally pay for a Uthao ride so that you don't lose five rides worth of money at once trying to be thrifty."

Rishi's chronic procrastination is ruining his life. Send him Instagram reels to procrastinate with at: instagram.com/aranyo_rishi