So we all know the drill with University, some of us have had the dream drummed into us by our parents since before we could walk, others come trying to find themselves, some come for the undeniable and irrefutable high percentage of nights that end in a fantastic drunken state and hell some of us actually come here looking to learn (yeah as if that would happen in a university, most students i know are lucky to get to 20% of their lectures in a week).
So how do we get here? Slogging our guts out for two years over learning A level material that is lucky to be relevant to even 10% of what you actually end up studying at degree level is one way, this usually, well from my experience anyway, separates people into one of three categories. The first (which i would place myself into) consists of people who are driven to the point where they wont sleep properly for weeks in anticipation of their exams, who study to the point of exhaustion in order to succeed. The second category are those irritating people who seemingly never lift a finger and yet somehow manage to not only get A's in all their exams, but are quite happy to stroll into the most respectable institutes of education in this country with little or no work ethic. The third is the type of person who will do no work of any kind all term and then freak out last minute, the result of this is usually either fluke success or abominable failure.
So on that fateful day where you have barely slept the night before you are handed your future in a brown paper envelope (pretty anti-climatic by any standard). The results enclosed in this envelope lead you down one of two paths. The first is the one where the massive knot of anxiety in your stomach that has nestled there for months unfurls as you have succeeded and gotten the necessary grades to get into where you wish to go.The second leads on to clearing and either getting into a university that you had not originally picked but whereby you have to settle in order to study and obtain a degree, or giving up on the idea of university at that present time and either reapplying the following year or going into employment. For me my results allowed me to get into where i wanted to go and so i was if not only practically giddy with joy that all my hard work had paid of but slightly feint at the weight and pressure that was suddenly lifted.
So you go through all of this heartache and hard work and you finally make it to the place you've been dreaming about studying for the past year at least and then you realise... Getting into university was never intended to be the end of this race we call life. Now comes the really scary part when you finally open your eyes to the fact that University is only the beginning of your adulthood. On top of this daunting thought that you now have to continue on the path you started to decide upon when you picked your GCSE subjects when you were fourteen (which to me seems completely absurd) all the while paying £9000 for the privilege.
I found it interesting my first week at university the lack of people who were actually truly excited about starting their course. I was alarmed at the number of people who were more concerned about getting pissed and high than learning...i mean this is university isn't it? A place of great esteem and knowledge, the place i had been dreaming of as an intellectual haven of some kind? The more i journeyed through my first term i began to see that priorities were to get drunk and have a good time, rather than the academic ones i had envisioned. I have a hunch my lecturers at the time were aware of this as i seem to recall abysmal attendance of most of my lectures and seminars which was to my surprise ignored by most of the staff. (of course it didn't help that most of them were held at 9am...that is practically 5am if you're a student!) So here is my little life lesson learned for today folks: Nothing is ever quite what you expect, ESPECIALLY UNIVERSITY.
