Are you a model student?

Paid work is an ideal way to subsidise your studies, as long as it doesn't clash with class. Nick Jackson reports

Published: 16 August 2006

John Lee Hooker once came up with a nice slice of pop wisdom that few students can afford to leave home without these days. The best things in life are free, he opined, but you can leave it to the birds and bees, just give me money.

A degree is certainly not free anymore. Most students try and fill the gaping hole in their overdraft with the old favourites of bar work and retail. But beyond the minimum wage lies the strange, hopeful wild west of well- paid student work.

Many a drunk, broke student has sworn that in the morning he will give his brains or his balls to the men in white coats. But recently sperm donation and clinical testing have fallen from favour with students. Sperm donors can no longer maintain their anonymity, so for every £17.50 pop you might expect 10 teenagers knocking at your door in 16 years' time. And clinical testing has lost much of its meagre, mercenary appeal since the eye-popping horror of this spring. So what is a poor student to do? Well, the best advice is probably to go back to the book shop for another interview. But students are nothing if not notorious for their refusal to take good advice.

Despite our best attempts to hide it behind ridiculous goatees and under absurd Peruvian woolly hats, most of us are at our most beautiful at university. Which, you might have thought, makes it the perfect time to make a living from your looks. Emily Mann, 22, started modelling after being scouted in the street in her first year at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Literally pulled off the street by the head of a model agency, Mann soon found that it was not just the money that kept her going. Student life at the Bartlett was highly stressful, she says, and "I needed that escape, that outlet, otherwise I'd have completely lost myself," she says.

Escape sometimes turned to distraction. "It was a hard battle," she says. "You could literally spend all your time at castings and shoots. When you sit down to do your work you're so hyped up."

Mann argues that modelling helped her architecture, giving her exposure to artists and innovative uses of graphics. "I wasn't just standing there," she says. "At the same time I learned so much about graphics. I could translate the graphics I was learning modelling in to the course."

Her tutors disagreed and threatened to refuse to pass her after she appeared on Channel Five's Make Me A Supermodel. It took two months of all-nighters for her to provide the coursework to persuade them to pass her. She wants to go back to university to finish the full architecture training, but for now is bassist for the wonderfully odd electro outfit Client.

Some students trade off their looks and charm in more discreet ways. Escorting has seedy connotations and at its dodgier end is a dangerous business. But while some student escorts go the whole hog, escorting does not have to mean whoring.

"It's strictly not about sex," says Nick Dekker, 24, founder of the now notorious Oxbridge Escorts, which he has since turned into a dating and escort website (www.takemetodinner.co.uk). Dekker came up with the idea after reading an article in an American magazine saying that women were increasingly using male escorts. He admits that he has now found out that it is a trend that has yet to catch on over here, but he did get paid to go on two dates. Modestly he suggests that this had more to do with the publicity surrounding the agency than his own manly charms. "It was good," he says. "Interesting." A qualification, perhaps? "Once you get the awkward bit with the money out of the way it was just fun. At first it is a bit strange, but you relax into it."

While Dekker was not a great hit as an escort himself, the website has done well. Particularly for a business that Dekker says started as a joke and had to be temporarily closed down after a Sunday Times report on the agency was passed round Balliol's senior common room. "Understandably they weren't happy about it," he says.

The Oxford University Careers Service recently got in touch with Dekker for career tips. A little ironic, he says, as he never sat his finals. "When you don't have anything to fall back on you have that extra impetus," he says. Good point. But then, some might ask, why go to university at all?

Most up-and-coming undergraduate entrepreneurs are forced to choose between their business and their degree. A lucky few do get away with it, just. James Nicola, 27, is managing director of JNA Consulting, the information management consultancy he set up while studying history at Oxford.

"At the end of the first year I realised I was bored and drinking too much," he says. Nicola sought relief from boredom in what some might say was an unlikely refuge, local government. Qualified only by his chutzpah he approached various councils offering to provide assessments of the efficacy of their programmes. Lambeth took him on to help improve their children's services. Soon he had more clients and was working a 40 to 50 hour week alongside his degree.

As his client base grew so did friction with his college, St John's. Nicola was thrown out of halls for working from his room and, while he kept doing the essays, found himself going to fewer and fewer tutorials. St John's interference still rankles. "I just can't square it with the attitude at American universities like MIT, where you're practically expected to start a business," he says. Nicola reckons universities are missing out on potential endowments by failing to encourage entrepreneurship.

The ongoing battle with his college reached a head over his finals. Nicola found a clash in his timetable. On the one hand a finals examination in Tudor history, on the other being paid to talk at an IT conference. "It was not a difficult decision," he says. He went to the conference. The next year he sat his finals and got a first. "I realised I was learning considerably more at work every day than at Oxford," he says. "Why should I bother wasting my time? There's not enough to keep you interested."

Coldplay once said that as students they found they had a choice between either starting a band or getting all too familiar with daytime TV favourites like Diagnosis Murder. The danger with getting too ambitious with your free time is that ready cash will always have a seductive draw for the down at heel student that the library obviously often lacks. Something your dons, who have chosen the library over ready cash, can find hard to understand. Be warned.