It’s okay if university life doesn’t always bring you joy.
I wish someone had made me aware of that earlier, but it must have been one of those things I just had to figure out on my own. I harbour a deep distaste for those kinds of life lessons, so even if it’s the kind of revelation you’re going to have to come to on your own, I still feel it is essential to share it with you today.
When I sat down to craft my addition to the Press’ annual Beginner’s Guide, I found myself without any substantial insight to impart upon the incoming class of freshmen. I have shared my recommendations twice during my time at the paper and I’m not sure they were much help at all. As I have gotten older and my prolonged and weary academic existence continues to march onwards, I have formed the opinion that there is truly no feasible way to prepare those starting their first year for what is to come.
This is not to say that university is a terrible, horrible, no-good-very-bad experience, but much like how a young person cannot know what it is like to be a grown-up until they find themselves truly sedimented in adulthood, university life repudiates explanation.
It’s funny, isn’t it? An institution that aims to propagate understanding cannot be elucidated to those who have not yet experienced it. Much like the old religions, academia is a closed practice that only a handful of people will ever have the pleasure of knowing so intimately.
This sentiment always made me feel as though I was incredibly selfish for disliking the life I had built for myself as a student. I knew I was one of the lucky ones, but my admittance into the groves of academe felt more reliant on the pernicious amount of hard work I had put into my education rather than plain old luck. Yet, even though the system I had come from was built to weed out brains like my own, I had made it.
So why didn’t it make me happy?
Here is the difficult truth: no matter how many works of fiction pound the stereotype into us, university isn’t supposed to be fun all the time. It’s hard work. More often than not, you are going to find yourself wanting to scream and cry and lose your mind. If, by the time December rolls around, you hate university, that’s okay. What you are doing is hard, and not everyone can do it. Sometimes, you might not even be able to do it and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I struggled for a long time to understand why university life wasn’t the way I had pictured it. Friends don’t always come easily. Going out every Friday night is exhausting. I’ve never once lost myself in the delicate nuance of a final paper. Yet once I realized that what I was living through wasn’t supposed to look like a Hollywood movie, I could forgive myself for feeling like university life wasn’t always for me.
Still, despite all of this, there is so much to love about Brock. You will find pockets of joy to revel in, just like I did. Whether it be through your friends, your studies or your extracurriculars, these next four years will be special — maybe just not always in the way you thought they would be.