Party's over, kids! — soniahsaid

By Georgia Wright

Not too long ago while I was sat outside on my break, a girl I had met twice before came and spoke to me. We got to talking about University, and how quickly it all seems to be over. She said that it doesn’t matter who you are, or where you go- any student will say that it all ended just a little too soon.

She told me that University is like a really good house party. All the right people are there, the music is great and you’re drunk enough to let it all go, but not drunk enough to make poor life decisions. Going home from Uni, she said, is like when it gets to that part of the night when you notice people starting to leave and the front room becomes a lot emptier than it was an hour ago. The sun starts to come up, and your friends have fallen asleep. It’s that moment, she said- when you pour everyone else another drink, and you tell them the party isn’t over yet. But by that point, it’s too late, and your girlfriend’s in the toilet being sick, and your best friend is holding her hair. So you go home, fall straight to sleep and you wake up with a massive hangover and blurred memories of the night before. That’s what uni’s like she said, it’s the best house party you’ve ever been to, that you never wanted to end.

After our conversation, I went back upstairs to work, and have thought about it every day since. I always thought it was the perfect analogy until I sat one night and thought about everything that has happened in the last three years in Canterbury.

I have changed in almost every way a person can change- and in most ways stayed exactly the same. I know this sounds like a paradox I’ve conjured up to sound poetic, but bear with me. Every person I know, when I asked if they’d changed since coming to Uni said yes- and then said no- and then explained their reasons for both answers. I think there is something so brave about leaving a place behind and starting a life somewhere new. There is courage in living with strangers, and starting an academic journey, that you will continually doubt you will ever reach the end of.

There isn’t any part of uni that leaves you completely unchanged. Like many experiences in life, it shapes and moulds you like clay. Like an artist making the same sculpture over and over, your final shape rarely ever changes but each line and dent will be different.

So- for me, an analogy of a house party no longer cuts it.

I think university is like a good book, perhaps one you never expected to ever love in the first place. Every person you meet becomes a character, every event a plotline, and every experience that changes you in some way a new chapter. This metaphor can continue for hours, the intricacies of a book fitting perfectly with the time you spend at university. The most fitting though being the point you come to finish your book. When the pages you hold in your right hand are thinner, and the bulk of your book is in your left.

The end of University mirrors the exact same sense of accomplishment and sadness that comes with finishing a book you have loved deeply. It is a feeling that never leaves you- only fades over time. Until that is, you open another book and fall in love all over again.

As Robert Frost said better than anyone, nothing gold can stay. But if it could, would we really want it to? I don’t think so.