As we begin our conversation over Zoom, Louise says to me, “I have a lot of feelings about my time in university… sorry Emma, there’s a lot to unpack here!”
Louise Nealon, award-winning author of Snowflake provides an alternative (and may I add an extremely refreshing) reflection on her time in Trinity. She steers away from the stereotypical view that college life presents itself as and offers a real authentic experience.
Louise graduated from Trinity in 2014, receiving a degree in English Literature. Originally, she started Trinity in 2009 studying English with philosophy. Following in the footsteps of her secondary school English teacher, she describes herself as “impressionable” as a teenager as she chose her teacher’s course English and philosophy as her first choice on the CAO form.
“I had no idea what philosophy even was.”
After six weeks, realising that philosophy wasn’t for her, she dropped out and re-entered Trinity a year later. She never understood the fascination that has been ingrained in so many households about attending Trinity. She says that there were very few people in her school from Kilcock, Co. Kildare who placed a Trinity course on their CAO, let alone attend Trinity in September. However, when she arrived on campus, she described how there was a lot of excitement amongst students to be in college and not just any college, but Trinity College.
“There were a lot of people in my course who were from schools in Dublin who were very excited to be there and I was not excited at all.”
“I kind of had a chip in my shoulder about it, there was nothing wrong with them, nothing wrong with being excited about being in university its really natural but I was at a point in my life where i wasn’t able to get excited about the kind of freedoms of university.”
She also commuted in her first two years of university, describing the impact that this experience had on her, “Its another kind of way the college experience can be so different because everyone has this idealised version of leaving home but you still have one foot at home … You’re moving from your often childhood family home to life and freedom and then having to come back.”
On describing the Trinity divide, Louise says “I kind of looked at people on my course like they were characters in a reality show and that there was a wall between us and anytime that fourth wall came down was in tutorials … people annoyed me or fascinated me but I didn’t think it was an option to make friends.”
“A lot of that was down to the attitude that I had and my own prejudices about the college I was going to, I was put off by people’s accents and where they went to school.”
As all arts students can relate, the agonising reality of an arts degree haunted Louise while studying at Trinity too. Louise tells me, “I always knew I wanted to write but never knew I could make a living out of it.” She spent a year studying French alongside English to pursue a career as a secondary school teacher, “I was always worried about what else was I going to do to kind of fund this need that I had to write.”
Ultimately, she committed to single honours English, saying “I realised if I was to do any other subject in university but especially in Trinity I wouldn’t have stuck it out.” Louise shows huge enthusiasm for her English classes. She names some of her favourite classes, which were taught by Deirdre Madden, Margaret Robinson, and Brendan O’Connell. She still fondly remembers Brendan’s tutorial on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
However, with writing also comes fierce rejection (another arts student’s joy). Louise says:
“I sometimes did well in exams and essays and sometimes didn’t… And I used to really beat myself up when I didn’t… And I think that’s a lot like perfectionist tendencies… looking back the majority of us did.”
In terms of involvement with clubs and societies, Louise says she sent a couple of submissions to Icarus but “got rejection emails left, right and center.”
“I genuinely isolated myself in my college life, the only thing I got involved in was camogie… because its what I knew”
On this topic of rejection, I asked Louise what her advice would be to students facing the same rejection in their writing today.
“I’ve gotten more confidence out of being rejected than accepted. If you’re accepted that’s lovely but you don’t learn anything from it. If something is rejected you’re kinda like okay that’s what I need to work on And that’s exciting that you have something to do.”
Although, even though she can give the advice, she knows her fresher self wouldn’t take it. “As much I as would love to go back and give all these words of wisdom .. I know that I would just do the same thing anyway.”
She acknowledges, “If I hadn’t gone through what I did, I wouldn’t have written Snowflake.”
She went to the Student Counselling services and has described her experience with counselling as a “mixed bag.”
“I really thought that I would feel better in myself if I did well in exams or essays, and even if I didn’t feel better, that the loneliness would be “worth it” in some way. I learned the hard way that it was this constant striving for academic success and external validation that was making me miserable. It’s something that I saw in so many of my classmates, a toxic perfectionism that is so entrenched and normalised that it still makes me sad to think about, because it kills the joy of what we’re there to do which is to read stories and think about them.”
“I was so impatient with myself. All the emotions ended up turning into something that I was able to write about.. and in turn to support myself financially and make a living from. If I had known that back then I really wouldn’t have believed it.”
Louise’s experience is a true reflection of so many college students today. Louise recalls, “I spent so much of my time in Trinity outside Trinity walking around Dublin because I felt like I didn’t belong in Trinity so much.”
It can be such an invalidating feeling to not lead this stereotypical college life but in reality, so many are feeling this same way. The only reason why these people’s feelings aren’t accounted for is because it doesn’t fit into the idealised version that society has portrayed college life to be, and more in particular, the generational pressure placed upon students attending Trinity.
Every student can have an extremely formative experience, it just doesn’t have to be a straightforward path as it has been labelled to be. As Louise describes:
“You learn so much about yourself. The best gift I gave myself now is that I learned so much about myself in that period of time and so much that I wanted to be in the world. With reading lots and writing lots and finding out how best to connect with other people. It was really really messy took wrong turns and an awful lot of support from family and friends back home.”
Louise ends our conversation by saying, “If you’re not having the best time, that’s okay too, not everyone is going to be bopping around on freshers’ week and wanting to get stuck into everything.”
“All you have to do is live it and come through it and you’ll come out the other end.”
