Fail, succeed, try again

Disregard all advice that is directed to you as a “student”. It’s a trap. Being a “student” does not make you someone different from who you were in sixth year or who you’ll be after you’ve gotten a degree.

“Student” is not a period set aside to tick boxes. If you hope not to be living in squalor in ten years, why would you want to do it now? If you hope not to be living with your parents in ten years then why go home every weekend? You don’t live at home anymore. College is not a five night sleepover before you really move out. Get a Christmas tree for your flat. Wash your own clothes. This is not your first go at being a “grown up”. That’s not how time works.

College is not four years to “do student” to be followed by an undetermined period in which to “do work”, or worse, “do adult”. Life s not divided into phases in which to do child, do student, do work, do marriage, do parenthood, retire, garden, die. Fortunately that’s not how time works. Time is all one big go.

But what college does give you is more time than you probably had before to explore and think. And it gives you a place, people and information to do it in and with. College gives you time to think about life, where it’s taken you thus far and where you want to take it next.

College gives you time to try and figure out what’s good for you and hopefully you can keep that up for good, not just for four or five or six years. Use your time here to try things, fail, succeed, figure out what works for you and then try to make the rest of your life as much like that as possible.

Realise that these are not the best years of your life. That’s bullshit fed to you by those who aren’t enjoying life anymore and who want to curb you once you enter their world.

College is not a prescribed period allowed to young people to get all their thinking and drinking out of the way. Don’t waste time making these the best years of your life as if it’s all downhill from here. It’s not. Time doesn’t go down. Try to make the best of life period, it’s all the best years.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy college because of how you live and what you do while you’re here. If you learn anything it should be that when you stop being a “student” you’re not going to change wholesale. What’s good about college is what’s good about life, there’s no distinction.

Don’t just do something because you’re a student and in ten years you don’t stop yourself from doing things because you’re not a student. Don’t spend four years being twenty-one and then the next thirty being fifty-one. What’s good’s good baby.

Activism, alcohol, drugs, learning, debate, discussion, whatever you’re having yourself, do not end with your degree. There is not a finite amount of knowledge or wine in the world, thankfully.

It’s all one big go. Enjoy.

 

D. Joyce-Ahearne

D is former Contributing Editor of Trinity News and Trinity Graduate.