I’ve been reflecting on my final weeks at Trinity, and to say it has been anticlimactic is an understatement. Exiting my last Zoom class at 5pm on a Friday and gently closing over the laptop felt no different to any other day I have experienced over the last year. There’s always a fleeting minute after logging off where it’s disorientating, almost like I’m consciously rewiring my own mind to re-adjust to physical reality. But that afternoon, that reflexive sense of confusion felt more like dread, as I stared blankly as my computer screen off into the distance. “What now?”, I wondered.
T.S. Eliot wrote that the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper, and in that moment, this seemed a pretty apt – and maybe somewhat selfish – metaphor for my very last day of my undergraduate studies. Around this time last year, I was reading very similar opinion pieces from the class of 2020. Never had we all imagined we’d still be here – wherever “here” may be for you. I’d quietly been hoping that, even throughout the unbearably long summer and even more trying first semester, that we’d somehow be back in the Arts Block by this point, just in time for another Trinity Ball. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be.
For a lot of people, for a plethora of reasons external to university, this year will not be one to be remembered fondly – and that’s OK. There is justified reason to be upset with the government for its handling of the pandemic, but this should not stop at higher education. For so many of us, at this critical juncture in our lives, we have lost more than a year of what is one of the most formative experiences we will ever have.
Around this time last year, I was reading very similar opinion pieces from the class of 2020. Never had we all imagined we’d still be here
This sense of lost time, I think, constitutes legitimate grounds to feel somewhat cheated. It wasn’t until a friend told me this week was the first time he’d ever worn a black tie and tux for a Trinity event – a Zoom graduation night – that it finally hit me how much we’d missed out on. I haven’t seen this person in person in nearly two years.
How different would things be if it weren’t for the coronavirus? Which bar would we have gone to to celebrate finishing up, in an alternative universe? That sort of rhetorical thinking isn’t healthy, and going down those kinds of rabbit holes can often do more harm than good, so I try not to do what I do best and overthink it. What I can say is that I am certain I wouldn’t be where I am now, and many Zoom-related randomised interventions with hundreds of people over the past 12 months have changed my mind multiple times about where I hope to be after college. Whether that is for better or worse, who knows?
Nostalgia, too, is a weird thing. It’s been a few weeks of reminiscing the hours spent brunching in the legendary café Lemon, the soothing sound of pages being turned in the Berkeley, and the faintest memories of things we’d really rather forget we did while a bit tipsy. You’d almost miss the awkward silences in those first-year seminars – but they never really got any easier over Zoom. It’s been an exhausting and occasionally lonely year for us, to say the least, and of course I miss the familiarity of it all. I miss dancing shamelessly with strangers in nightclubs. I miss going to museums and concerts.
But most of all, I miss hugging the people I love. It’s disappointing that we won’t all be sharing these last few hours together, but we will be able to share experiences again – when the time is right.
How different would things be if it weren’t for the coronavirus? Which bar would we have gone to to celebrate finishing up, in an alternative universe?
Although it would be inaccurate to say that everything in the past year has been a complete disaster, the pandemic has exposed the fundamental cracks in the Irish higher education system. From its blatant ableism to extortionate fees to the heavily flawed leaving certificate exam system, it’s clearer than ever that certain students are being left behind – and it is important that in a post-virus world, policymakers are able to carry this momentum through and implement tangible changes to a system which still remains elitist and elusive.
I take comfort in the fact that even after I leave – and hopefully, get to walk out Front Gate one last time with my friends – there will still be people continuing to fight these systemic injustices, inside and outside the walls of Trinity. And as newly fledged graduates, facing an era of uncertainty and instability, we need to be ready to support these movements – in any way possible.
