Daniel Selikowitz explains the four-year mistake you’re about to make
Congratulations - you’re at uni! By being here today (assuming you’re actually enrolled and not one of those TAFE kids who wandered in for the BBQ), you’re part of the whatever of Australians undertaking tertiary studies. You now have a right to voice your opinion on any number of subjects beyond your personal experience, demand that our troops be pulled out of Iraq by Monday, and start laughing at that fat guy near Citay Road who sells The Big Issue. Kudos.
Just think: fourth months ago you were soiling your underpants with elation/depression after receiving your UAI and swilling vodka mixers with your ‘bffs’. Now you’re deliberately avoiding anyone you went to school with, sweating like a pig in your Cargo-Bar best and signing up to Subski for the bottle-opener key ring. How far you’ve come!
But it’s not all fun and games. Behind the playful facade of O-Week and newly washed sandstone lies a harsh, feculent truth: you’ve made a big mistake.
“Your first year of uni is the best year of your life!” So sayeth mum and dad. What they mean is, “Your first year of uni is the best year of our lives, because now we can stop paying through the nose for private schools and tutors and start fornicating on weeknights.”
Alas, uni is not what you thought it would be. Instead of contracting exotic venereal diseases from your classmates, you’ll be doing inane group assignments in the library. Rather than asserting your own unique voice and challenging the establishment, you’ll be writing 2500 word essays about why George W. Bush is the anti-Christ. Best of all, you’ll cough up around $60,000 for the privilege.
No, there’s not much to be said for being the small fish in the big pond. Particularly when the big pond is in Victoria Park and full of duck shit. But in case these warnings aren’t sufficiently clear, here’s an outline of what you can expect from your average four-year degree. Enjoy.
First Year: Adolescence, Again
It’s time to relive those years of self-consciousness and self-doubt, minus the chest growth and unwanted erections. This is your chance to reinvent yourself as someone you’d avoid in the street five years from now. In fact, you can be whatever you like! - as long as you fall within one of the accepted 1st-year personality categories (see Bennett’s quiz on p.13 “What type of student are you?”) If you’re stuck for ideas, consider some of the tried and tested options: self-mutilating emo; Trotsky-loving vegan; and annoying dude who wears those glasses from Risky Business and attends warehouse parties in Alexandria.
You coast through this year - pausing to talk your way out of a plagiarism charge in September - and finish with a surprisingly respectable credit average. Don’t get too complacent, though, because you’re about to enter...
Second Year: Britney
This is the year when everything goes pear-shaped. You might not be jacking off members of the paparazzi and resisting admission to a Californian psych ward, but you’re no longer the charming little boy/girl your parents have come to know and tolerate.
Gone are the motivation of high school and naďve preppiness of first year, replaced by a blasé attitude to academia and a wardrobe full of hoodies. The sex and drugs that were promised in first year suddenly materialise, but both are of a significantly lower quality than you’d hoped.
Why all these changes? Because this, my friend, is the year of the ‘cool’ boy/girlfriend. You meet this character through a mutual acquaintance you don’t really trust, or at a morbidly-themed party, or in some ridiculous class on Patriarchy and Penis Envy in My Little Pony. Initial fascination turns to heavy petting, which in turn becomes a truly world-class attachment disorder. The disapproval of your family and friends is suddenly a badge of honour, and - at the height of your insanity - you may find yourself listening to a lot of Interpol and crying during sex.
You wake in a cold sweat on November 30th with an academic transcript that reads like a Franklins receipt.
Third Year: Nothing to write home about
Third year is like Tuesday: meh. It’s not terrible like Monday or awesome like Friday - it just sits there between second and fourth, trying to keep its head down so the teacher doesn’t ask it a question.
This year you go on exchange to an Ivy League school (the elite 1%), a fashionable European university (the bright 5%), or a severely under-funded technical college in Osaka (the rest of you). You return feeling superior to your untravelled peers because you have spent six months having sex with foreigners and ironing your own clothes. In other words, you have become your mother.
Your grades make a comeback after the second year fiasco, but potential employers still regard you as ‘janitor material’.
Honours: You’re still here?
Unwilling to tell friends you were passed over for every clerkship and grad position on offer, you rely on further study to save your sorry ass. By the end of the year, you will be unsure how lying on the couch watching Fox8 and eating cookie crumbs out of your navel makes you ‘honourable’. Never mind. Crank out your 15,000-word thesis during an 8-day meth binge and you can shove four new letters after your name.
Having second thoughts? Don’t despair - uni isn’t all bad. These are the easy days; the days when nothing really matters; days when you can get boozed at Manning between lectures, play Hide n’ Go Sleep in Fisher, and indulge your neuroses for hours on end.
While you’re on campus, you can do pretty much whatever you like. Don’t shave for three months! Wear Havaianas in mid-winter! Sign a petition to save animals or people you didn’t know were in danger! Hell, you can even ride a bicycle from your Surry Hills sharehouse to your 3pm tute while drinking a Diet Coke and listening to indie rock on your Nano! At uni, no one really cares what you do with yourself, so just hang out and have a blast.
To quote the University of Sydney motto, “Sidere Mens Eadem Mutato.” The stars change, but your HECS repayments are constant.
Happy learning!