Congratulations! Now that you’ve survived the leaving certificate – wait, no sorry, scratch that. Sensitive area. Tread softly, tread softly. My apologies. Let’s start over.
Now that you’ve survived predicted grades (doesn’t quite have the same nightmare-inducing ring to it, does it?) and only gone ahead and signed up to college this year, you, my friend, have defied all the odds and become the stuff of novels and television series: a real life Trinity student.
You’ve made it this far, and – cheesy motivational speech coming your way – you will make it through, again. You are stronger than you think. (If you can expect anything this year, it will be the torrent of motivational quotes being fired your way. My advice? Keep calm and carry on.)
Starting college can be a very exciting time for students, full of hopes and dreams for a new, better way of life, one that many of you may have been nursing ever since you watched Normal People. Indeed, many of you may have applied to study at Trinity with the ambition of living Connell and Marianne’s Trinity days for yourselves. Attending wine and cheese parties. Befriending sexy classmates with sexy accents. Strutting across Front Square in fancy wax jackets on your way to lectures. But this year, thanks to a special someone, your Trinity days – for the time being, anyway – might not look like that.
Reading this, you might be angry, cursing all your robbed so-called rites of passage. You might be anxious, scared, second guessing yourself, asking: ‘Do I deserve to be here? Do I even want to be here?’ – followed by the comical: ‘Where exactly is here?’ And lying at the root of it all, one simple question: ‘Why me?’
This is a perfectly normal (sorry) reaction to a very abnormal situation and I feel for you, I do.
But just as we witnessed Connell struggle in his first year at Trinity, college isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. It can be daunting, challenging, lonely. And that’s without a global pandemic thrown into the mix.
Coronavirus has flipped college on its head and sent us all scrambling … home. “But I just got here!”, I hear you cry. Online learning, social distancing and mask wearing on campus, no parties. Coronavirus has wiped away all we ever knew about college and has forced us to start afresh, with no clear roadmap to guide us on our “journey to self-discovery”.
But maybe that’s a good thing.
They say college is a time for reinvention, starting over – new year, new me and all that malarkey. College is about trying new things, and seeing the world in a different way and, indeed, seeing yourself in a different way. It is a time when you can become the “you” that maybe you couldn’t be back in secondary school when you felt trapped by labels and preconceived ideas of who you were and what you could be.
This year, in a world that is inextricably changed, maybe now is the best time for you to be that “you”.
This year, college is not normal. We don’t know exactly what it will look like, but we’ve got a fairly good idea. We’ll be confined to our bedrooms for the most part. Lecturers will try – and inevitably fail – to operate the Zoom chat function. We’ll learn how to decipher mask-speak and most importantly, nail our smise game.
But global pandemic or no, some things never change. We’ll still have to get up for that 9am lecture. We’ll still have to battle with Academic Registry. We’ll still have to navigate Blackboard. None of things were easy even in normal times, but we still made it through.
So can you.
As an Erasmus student in a foreign land who is also trying to find their way and navigate these new choppy waters, I have kept you all in mind as I wrote these words. In them, I hope that you’ll find some comfort, useful information and advice and if all that fails, laughter. It is the best medicine, after all.
So this year, let’s start over. We have to relearn everything, but that’s what college is all about. It may not be the college story you saw yourself living, but it is the one you can author. This year, dear fresher, make college your own – even if that means curating specialised Zoom backgrounds for each of your modules. Embrace the uncertainty and change. Keep calm and carry on. Because you never know: you might just find enough inspiration for producing a bestselling book and highly acclaimed television series at the end of it all.
