What’s the point? A Graduate’s Understanding of University in 2021
So, today (I think) I’ve officially graduated from university. I say this hesitantly because I don’t know when I graduate, courtesy of everything being online and lost in emails. Everything is a big blur and time is a blob, you know the drill.
It’s been a rocky journey to reach this point and I have some thoughts on my experience. So, since I haven’t been able to do anything else but think, I decided to write something on what I feel and, hopefully, it resonates.
Receiving my degree in the post and celebrating online wasn’t anywhere on my list for my experience at university. There were a lot of things I didn’t and could never have anticipated for my experience at university. There were a lot of things that swerved me off the beaten path. There were many times I was thrown into the proverbial ditch. I mean, there was that one time I did fall into a ditch drunk — but that’s not the point.
The point.
What is the point? Of this article, you might say? Well, there isn’t one. This is simply for me to articulate that I don’t think there is one. And hopefully, that is okay. Unfortunately, I don’t feel any more able to answer that question than when I was scrolling through UCAS aged 17 and trolling league tables to make my decisions for me.
For a lot of us, choosing a university is the first decision we have made ourselves. Sure, there are a lot of outside influences that can sway your decision. However, applying and selecting where you want to go is your decision alone. It’s your income, your housing and your education. Your parents (usually) don’t walk you to and from lectures and class, they don’t sit in your seminars with you. You are the provider for yourself and you are the one to answer to no matter which way it goes; good or bad. That can be an intensely scary thing. Especially, for those of us who, up until that point, haven’t ever booked a dentist appointment by ourselves.
University was not what I thought it was going to be, or what I was told it was going to be. I didn’t enjoy nights out. I hate vodka. I can’t stand sitting in libraries to work. I DESPISE cooking for myself. The list is endless.
However, the new decisions are endless when you first get to university. Even the ones you don’t like. That can be a very overwhelming jump. We are warned often about the deep end of a pool. However, it doesn’t sink in… until you do. When you drown and your head bobs up and down taking fresh air into your lungs by the shallow end holding onto the pool edge with swim floats and armbands flailing.
That is when you understand two things: what it means to sink, and what it means to swim. Neither of these things is easy. And for much of my time at university, I couldn’t tell the difference between the two, but I was learning how to do both.
Swimming is one of the first things we learn how to do. Not actual swimming — I still know a lot of people who can’t, but, to swim in the big blue sea; the world. There’s an interesting fact about babies. Most of them are adept at swimming as soon as they’re born. But why is it that pulling yourself over to water as an adult can often end in the earlier visual — the sputtering, the taste of salt or chlorine clinging to your tongue, the snot… Why is it that swimming can feel so difficult? More importantly, why is it that university can feel so daunting even though we have been preparing for it since our first day in reception?
One of my first school memories included having to walk into class and sit in our assigned seats. Children cried and whined because they couldn’t sit next to their best friends. Chairs were scraped against the floor in stroppy protest. There was even one kid who tried to rip his name tag off the chair to sit somewhere else. Being told what to do doesn’t sit very well with a lot of people, but we grin and bear it.
The question is why? Why is it so natural to knuckle under? Well, because that’s just the rules, the way the world works! This isn’t to propose that studying at university is an act of rebellion, quite the contrary when most of us decide to choose degrees based on financial prospects over enjoyment (or have a very long exhaustive list of reasons why they aren’t “completely useless”).
University is not a sink or swim environment. It’s the shallow end of the pool you claw your way to in a series of sloshing salty chlorine water rushing into your nostrils. It’s the part you dip your toe in… then slip and fall into. University is the last stage of education for many, but the learning doesn’t end there. Even if you don’t go on to do a masters degree or PHD or go back for second bachelors. Like water, there never seems to be an end. Only a bigger container for it. It is unpredictable and unknowable. Which is equally as intriguing as it is baffling.
However, even while writing this, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I would be opening emails alone in my room to tell me I’ve finished. Mircosoft Teams graduation celebrations are, of course, part of this unpredictableness.
Unlike a lot of students across the country that have graduated within the past two years, I don’t think the experience has been for nought. It’s not that I’d say university is “pointless” but I do think I have always been just left of the point of it. The point of university is like a flash or flicker of light in blurry trees on the train. Similar to the ones I saw every weekend travelling to and from London every weekend for my terrible minimum wage job.
There were so many things I did to make sure that I didn’t “fail”. I needed to make sure I got everything I possibly could out of university. Endlessly, I forced myself to do things to get more out of my time while studying, scrapping the very last bits of ice cream at the bottom of the tub. However, I don’t think any of that was truly the point. Everything I did other than enjoying myself, doing what I wanted to do, and listening to myself ended horribly. So many things went wrong that at one point, with a face full of cystic acne, I thought I had a black cloud hanging over my head that everyone else could see too. That was not the case.
University is about getting used to the shallow end of the pool. It is the place to kick your feet around, to flail, to make mistakes. To inhale chlorine into your lungs and cough like no tomorrow. It’s the place of wrinkled prune feet from fighting water for so long that even your skin gives up. It is the home of bad decisions and friendships that fail, of taking your goggles off and trying to see underwater yourself. The sight is blurry and messy and not what everyone describes (I don’t recommend, by the way).
University is the dirty floor of the community centre pool one day and the most tranquil part of the ocean another. It is where you are allowed to be yourself, which is the first time for a lot of us. And it teaches you, how to swim and how to sink. It shows you that both are necessary and both will continue to happen too.
The point is, curveballs will be thrown at you. Just like that one idiot that cannonballs into the deep end of the pool and splashes everyone. Just stop fighting!
Stop trying to answer the question “to sink or to swim?”
The point is try to stay afloat.
