Looking Back at the end of University
This is one of the many articles I half-wrote and never published. I’ve got the time now to look back at what I’ve written and it means a lot, seeing what ways I’ve changed and in what ways I’m still the same kid.
Hoping it’s not too unintelligible.
No longer a student
It’s been two hours after my last exam (Graphics, a surprising ball ache) and ten weeks since I’ve been outside the West Midlands. Sitting on a train back home to London I had one thing consistently on my mind.
Exam season is rough.
I spent my very hardest ignoring parts of my brain flaring up for three months — the ever-present thought that regardless of what I was doing, I could be revising, and if I was revising, I could be revising more effectively.
It showed in conversations with friends, each day repeated itself by asking when the next exam is and how we’re feeling about it. We were bound by our mutual disdain for the situation we found ourselves in.
You’re constantly surrounded by people doing the exact same thing as you. Early in the morning you squeeze onto any available seat to revise until dinner time, by that point you’re absolutely exhausted and starving, getting anything more than a snack for lunch meant losing your seat.
By the end of it we had our own spots on the same floor, recognising the unnamed faces turning up at the same time every day. Household nicknames were established for the couples that were always a bit loud or the guy that bobbed his head the whole day with music leaking out his headphones. Anyone that looked vaguely alive were the distractions we desperately needed.
It’s incredibly lonely, you’re with people but hardly speaking to anyone. With everyone around you either reading, typing or writing, they exist as a constant reminder that you should be working. Telling me that I wasn’t working as hard as everyone else.
Thank god I wasn’t.
Laziness or Nonchalance?
I made sure to keep up with all my hobbies throughout exams, most weeks I played basketball and went to the gym at least twice a week each. While my housemates took the 7 am bus I was waking up closer to 10, thinking about exercise and breakfast instead of the Machine Learning exam in a week.
This gave me the variation and social life I needed to not feel completely trapped. To the same end being able to phone my family on walks to and from university was also vital, small things like hearing my mother had just come back from walking the dog put everything in perspective, and allowed me to separate from the student bubble.
This isn’t supposed to be a ridiculous claim that students need to spend less time cramming in a library and more time with nature, I’ll have to wait for my results before concluding that I haven’t been completely idiotic. I can’t imagine surviving the term if I had followed my friends’ paths of throwing hours at my exams hoping 1 in 10 would stick. Living off the validation from the fact that today you spent 37 minutes longer revising than your friends.
Something that it really highlighted to me was how easy it is to think that everyone else has their shit together while you don’t, and how easy it is to conform throughout your 3 messy years of higher education.
Dealing with Now
It’ll take a while for my mind to adjust to the fact that exams are done but I know how big of a moment this is. This marks the end of my time as a university student, a whirlwind that’s shaped, broken and rebuilt me into someone completely different from who I was before.
So I just wanted to end it by saying thanks Warwick, despite it all, you’ll be missed.
I ended up scraping a 2.1, with third-year being my best overall grade (despite completely flunking German). In isolation now I can’t help but think maybe I should’ve taken more inspiration from a year ago.
Takeaways a year later:
I don’t really see this as a piece about effective methods for studying or emphasising mental health during stressful times, though those topics are definitely touched on.
What this story truly meant for me is something I’m still in a lot of ways coming to terms with — that while you can take people’s advice and follow norms, fundamentally what works for you is an incredibly personal thing and a lot of the time it’s not what’s considered the best.
With everything you do, whether that’s careers, relationships or anything else, you’ll discover what works best for you from experience and in turn, learn more about the enigma that is you.
Thanks for reading
