The “university experience:” a time in which you get out what you put in, as we are so often reminded. “The golden years” is another familiar adage, “the best years of your life” say tax-paying adults through gritted teeth, staring into the middle distance in a moment of melancholic nostalgia before rushing back to lives of reason and responsibility. So what should we be putting in, and what should we hope to be getting out? How best should students spend their precious four years of learning, the gentle, meandering progression away from adolescence towards the toll of adult life and nine-to-fives?
To the medic-chemic-chanic-ologist readers, the question I pose feels less of a concern; already wrapped up in library-lab realities, the years of freedom in abundance may feel firmly behind you. And yet who doesn’t know a medic that manages to squeeze cheap drinks and bad decisions into their pseudo-adult schedule? So what for the dreamers? The writers? The students whose degrees seem to epitomise this idea of “autonomous learning;” with no-contact hours in abundance, we are faced each week with questions on whether to plan or prepare for the fast-approaching working world, or rejoice in the final years of it being socially acceptable to skip through the streets of Edinburgh with strangers and friends, dancing on tabletops until the wee hours, kissing someone you shouldn’t and spending the next morning laughing about all the night’s mishaps.
The obvious answer appears to be striking a balance that will both quench the thirst for soaking up the “golden years,” supplying oneself with a lifetime of good stories borne from bad decisions, the period forever labelled as “the time before I got it all together,” whilst also doing enough adulting and creating enough good routines to arm oneself with the skills and experiences that will allow you to successfully pose as an adult until you actually become one. So what might this balance look like?
Having been on LinkedIn for a total of three days now, I say with confidence that creating an account whilst you’re in an educational sphere makes for easier connections with people who have similar ambitions and exposes you to university opportunities that slightly irritating go-getter peers have already embarked on. Career meetings available from the university are useful if you know what you want to do, and even more so if you don’t – worth a go. It’s a very unnerving sensation when peers whom you thought you knew all start running marathons as though it’s an eventuality. Excluding this freak phenomenon, realising that regular exercise releases all the happy endorphins is an adult-esque habit better conquered now than when our timetables are fuller and metabolisms slower.
Sometimes reading what you love is more important than reading what you’re told. As for societies, they look great on a CV, but mainly, they’re for figuring out what lights your fire. If you find what you love, societies become the defining feature of a university experience that doesn’t balance freedom and ambition, but enhances both, symbiotically.
“The Hacker @ Access” by Cabaret Voltaire is licensed under CC BY 2.0.