- Photo: TCD Alumni office
For most of you, the end of exams has come with delight; an end to toil and the beginning of a summer filled with excitement, opening onto another year of opportunity and optimism. I do not know if I can speak for many of my peers who have just finished their finals, but upon completing my exams I have been profoundly depressed. The past four years, my time in Trinity, have been undoubtedly and without compare the best of my life. They provided a certain, albeit malleable structure to life and a sense that even though it is probably not the case, what you were doing mattered, a structure for social life, a structure for learning in a more general rather than educational sense. All that is gone now and we are faced with the harsh reality of life outside the bubble. We delude ourselves that what waits for us is going to be better, but in reality it will probably be on par or slightly worse. Do any of us dream of cleaning out the fridge on a Saturday afternoon, or wandering, horrified, around DIY shops? I hope not.
On Friday, 10th May I finished my last ever exam. It didn’t go terribly well, but it went better than I expected. As I stepped out onto the steps of the exam hall, I was waiting for a great moment of elation, but it never came. The class trudged down to the Pav in sunshine, the perfect recipe for a good day, and yet when we sat around outside, for the first fifteen minutes there was near silence as we all quietly contemplated what was actually happening. It was over, but not the good kind of over, the “oh shit, what’s next” kind of over. There was hollow talk of looking forward to lie-ins, exciting trips or Mini-McAdventures we had planned, but deep down we all knew that this was not really much cause for celebration. Our lives, in the next few months, are going to undergo substantial change, and not necessarily for the better. In truth, the realisations of May 10th were not new. The weeks preceding the end of my education had been somewhat melancholy. Every walk, every action, every interaction took on a depressingly nostalgic mantle. Sitting in the window of a top floor apartment in the rubrics, I could not help but think that this was the last time I would ever see college from quite that perspective. Walking back to Goldsmith that night, I could not help but think that this was one of the last times I would undertake this journey with any regularity. Everything seemed a little more special because it was becoming, daily, more finite. Maybe this is just a chronic case of pre-emptive arrested development, but it is what it is.
Trinity provides us with both an incredible ego boost, the august surroundings of college reminding us daily that we are, supposedly, the best this country has to offer and offers insulation for the reality outside its walls. Through clubs, societies, unions and classes we are granted the opportunity to make a name and a place for ourselves and to “be somebody”, albeit it in a very confined and parochial way. It is enthralling and addictive, and it comes to an abrupt end. For those of us with sobering academic achievements, entering into a real world blighted by economic hardship and unemployment, the future is decidedly dark. If we have not subscribed, or not had the ability to subscribe to the chattel of internship or placement which is expected of us, we are left to steer ourselves through dark waters where our college glory days will be but a distant memory. It seems at the outset of this venture into reality that the outside world is not one ready or willing to recognise achievement which cannot necessarily be quantified or appreciated. I look at many graduates I have known who drift about their middle twenties in search of fulfilment which never comes. Any of us who did an Arts subject were taught, more or less straight away that while the information we were learning was useless in a world which seeks application, the skills that we would be taught would be recognised by employers and security was assured. I call bullshit on that one.
That being said, would I have chosen anything other than an Arts subject? No. I chose to study an Arts subject because, naively, I believed that it would pay off in the end. When I was in school, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be, but four years of exposure to different ways of being have left me rudderless, too often the prey of currents and new enthusiasm or ideas. At every stage of our lives we are presented with opportunities, not necessarily to improve, but rather to become a little less exceptional. The expression about fishes in ponds seems to me to be absolutely true, except every time you move the pond gets a little bigger, the fish a little smaller. The opportunity to make money is the only incentive to keep us moving, but somewhere inside us we must all know that if we have subscribed to the societal or at least industrial hegemony of the degree-internship-masters-contract, it will lead us nowhere but to unfulfilling middle-management, no prospects, no joy, no life in any substantial terms. We decorate our homes, we buy organic food, we go on holiday, we produce children all in the hope of finding some great happiness; do we really ever achieve this, or do our expectations of ourselves just get more mediocre with the passage of time and the daily grind of petty defeat?
The truth is probably that I have never much cared for change, or had much courage for it. Sitting in a halogen cubicle is a far cry from the hallowed halls of Trinity College. Above all I will be sad to leave a place which has given me so much; friends, fulfilment, a litany of useless knowledge and above all fun. Whether life gets better after college, we will only be able to tell with time, but it’s been so good it’s hard to imagine how it could be.
