A life less student-y

Between student and graduate

So here it is. Finally I can stay up late without necessity, sleep in without guilt, and party without consequence, safe in the knowledge that I have already done all I can to sabotage my degree over the past few months, that it no longer matters. Yet I can’t help but feel resentful of the increasing insecurity that a lack of purpose has thrust upon me. Actually, that’s not so far from regular student life now that I think about it….

Walking aimlessly around campus after handing in my last piece of undergraduate work, with the hazy look of someone who has just been made redundant (and had one G&T too many in the Courtyard as a result), the intense inertia began to rise within me. No one prepares you for degree-withdrawal symptoms. There’s no handbook, no lecture on ‘So Now You’re Useless: Approaches to Life during Uni-Purgatory’, for that.

Clearly I wouldn’t go so far as to claim envy for those of my poor colleagues still plagued with exams and coursework, heaven forbid. There’s not enough distance for me to romanticise those demon days of stress and anguish quite yet. When you’re working though, it's so much easier to cast out of mind the looming sense of uneasy nostalgia for the past three years, and the maddening uncertainty of those to come, that takes over one’s thoughts like a tumour when you’ve nothing to do.

Persisting in celebration over this state of existence, without fully realising what it meant, I spent the first half of this week in indulgent revelry. Boozey lunches and dashes around town, feeling exhilarated that 'shopping' was no longer a dirty word in my vocabulary, life was like a kept woman’s dream. Sadly, however, it couldn’t last. Soon the degree-hangover had taken over, with no sight of the cure that will be (I imagine) graduation day.

It’s one of life’s funny little screw-overs that when you get the one thing you have been dreaming of you have absolutely no clue as to how best to use it. Naturally then, I have been fastidiously planning on how to whittle the summer away student-style.

What does the student do when they are no longer a student? Pretend, of course. Rather than the scouring of the library, book pages, and Jstor that has punctuated life up till the present moment, I have simply substituted one type of research for another. Now my reading comes in the form of novels, holiday brochures and easyjet.com, my essays in the ridiculously long emails and texts I have been sending out to the neglected people from home, with whom I will all-too-soon be reunited when the student house lease runs out and I’ll be sent packing back to from whence I came.

Home. Now that’s a novel concept.

Having quit being a student in anything other than resemblance, quite against my own will, it seems the long-term psychological effects will be with me for a while. Who knows for how long I will brandish my NUS card demanding out-of-date discounts, sit alone watching Neighbours in my pyjamas before realising my housemates aren’t around to join me in our daily ritual, or make meals big enough for four people out of nothing more than a couple of tins of chopped tomatoes and a head of lettuce?

Ok, so maybe the romanticising has already begun, but the reality is no less (stupidly) unreal. I suppose it’s a very pronounced version of the shift that follows every year - the bittersweet realisation that ‘Oh god, I’ll never be a first/second year again’ and that ‘Oh god, I’ll never be a first/second year again!’ - just worse and better in equal measure.

Maybe I’m approaching this all wrong. Maybe I should just enjoy the moment without thinking about it so much. Maybe I should reject my studious instinct to analyse and argue. Maybe, just maybe, I should force myself to wallow in free time instead of fighting against it. Surely that’s the student way to live?

But then, I guess, it would feel even more real, even more like a loss, and thus even harder to give up in the end.

So I think I’ll stick to delusion for now until graduation day, and maybe a bit longer still after that. Delusion and time management and festivity, oh my.

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