I guess the phrase “paying my respects” technically qualifies as an idiom because it definitely can’t be understood through the meaning of the individual words, or at least not through the meaning of the words as we currently use them.
As best as I can figure, paying respects means both acknowledging and attempting to repay an unpayable debt. It means holding the contradictory understanding that your words or thoughts will never be enough, but that they are fundamentally necessary all the same.
Growing up causes most of us to have a lot of these relationships in which, consciously or unconsciously, through no fault of our own, we take far more than we can give back. They can be relationships with people – mothers, fathers, teachers, coaches – but they can also be relationships with places.
Now that I’ve graduated from Trinity, this may be one of the last times I find myself so sharply indebted to a place that isn’t paying me. That debt will be settled on paper, of course. I paid money – quite a lot of it, as a non-EU student – to the institution that is Trinity for the academic and social opportunities it provided. But I am also fortunate to come from a family where very little of that money was actually “mine”, and so I again find myself facing the original problem.
Having a “good” time at university is still a process with an awful lot of failures and mistakes, and in its own way it is still a struggle
More to the point, I struggle with the feeling that money doesn’t capture the full scope of the situation. Money accounts for one significant type of debt that I owe to Trinity, but what can money say about the debts I owe to Dublin and to Ireland and to my friends and to the staff at Lemon and to the people I met just once whose memories still mean a great deal to me?
I took at least two years at university, and arguably more like three, to figure out what I actually wanted to make of my experience here. Reaching that point required significant good fortune in the people I met and maybe also in the ones I listened to. If people look at my CV on paper and want to say that I had a relatively good time of it, I would have to agree. But a list of only the things that went right can oversimplify anyone’s story. Having a “good” time at university is still a process with an awful lot of failures and mistakes, and in its own way it is still a struggle.
Some of the advantages I enjoyed and which helped make my time at Trinity a success, including the financial situation discussed above, do not apply equally to all students. And they are not all as obvious as money.
As weird as it sounds, I owe so much to Trinity Hall for giving me a place to comfortably adjust to college life despite my tendency to be relentlessly stupid in the way that only an 18-year-old can be. That communal experience is limited to roughly one-third of all first-years, and certainly not everyone had the same positive Halls experience that I had. But I was able to exit my first year at Trinity with a diverse range of friends, memories and experiences that provided a foundation for my growth as a person.
I also owe a surprising thanks to my BESS degree. I was luckier than I could have known at the time to enter Trinity under such a flexible, multidisciplinary programme. Many students struggle at university because they had to choose a course at a young age which they now know they aren’t suited for and out of which they may not have the resources to transfer. My experience would have been the same if I had been locked into a course from the very start of my first year. Instead, my early, nominal interest in political science quickly gave way to the realisation that economics not only got me more excited about learning, but also gave me a compelling new language with which to think about and analyse the things happening around me. BESS students deserve all the abuse we get, but the programme gave me the opportunity to painlessly shift my academic focus and introduced me to some of the brightest and most ambitious people I met at Trinity.
I learned to (hopefully) be less cynical about the best efforts of both students and staff, because there are a lot of incredible people at Trinity who work extremely hard every day to make the student experience a better one
Finally, and perhaps most obviously to those who know me, my somewhat unwitting second-year start at The University Times fundamentally changed my time at Trinity and altered the trajectory of my post-collegiate life. Over three years, I transformed from a person who liked to write but couldn’t name a single students’ union sabbatical officer to one who cared and knew enough about student issues to launch a very-much-failed-and-in-hindsight-not-such-a-great-idea campaign for TCDSU President. And when I say “I transformed”, I more accurately mean that the people I met transformed me, mostly for the better. Among many other things, I learned to (hopefully) be less cynical about the best efforts of both students and staff, because there are a lot of incredible people at Trinity who work extremely hard every day to make the student experience a better one. And I believe that will continue to be true of most places I go in life.
In the most sincere, straightforward language I can muster, this is my attempt to pay my respects to the people and the place that are Trinity, or who were “my” Trinity. I understand that there are many legitimate reasons why not everyone will have the same positive takeaways from university that I did, but hopefully verbalising my gratitude might make a difference in the thinking of even one current or future student. Either way, it’s all that I have to offer right now.
