IT’S OKAY IF UNIVERSITY IS NOT THE “BEST YEARS OF YOUR LIFE”

Before heading off to university, it is inevitable that someone will say “university will be the best years of your life”.

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It’s happened to us all — whether from a head teacher, a loving grandad or a beaming hot-shot graduate, someone will have said these words to you. They mean well, they really do.

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University is meant to be the best time of your life, right?

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What happens if it isn’t?

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What happens if you don’t like your course?

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Or your flatmates?

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Or if you struggle with your mental health?

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Or you don’t like living away from home?

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Or if a global pandemic derails your whole experience?

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While university provides an opportunity to have an amazing few years transitioning from living at home to the ‘real world’, whatever that may mean, the pressure for those three years to be the best of your life really does build up, after that narrative is fed to you by family, friends and every form of media that depicts students.

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As a sixth-former getting ready to head into the daunting environment of university, I was convinced my university experience would be exactly like Channel 4’s Fresh Meat. Not the most glamorous representation of university, I know, but that’s what I thought university life was going to be like.

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Whether I was convinced I was going to be exactly like Josie just because we’re both Welsh or if I wanted the camaraderie of living with a group of strangers and forming strange but tying bonds, I’m not sure. 

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What I do know is that my university experience has been nothing like Fresh Meat.

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Have I had a life-changing experience? Yes — I’ve made many friends, had so much fun, and had the experience of living in a city for the first time.

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But I’ve also been incredibly stressed, suffered with mental illness, had some bad marks on essays which really brought down my academic confidence, and also suffered with imposter syndrome, all whilst going through a pandemic.

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The pandemic presented even further challenges to my university experience, with socials, club nights and trips to the pub all being cancelled.

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Coupled with seminars and lectures moving online, my university experience — supposedly the ‘best time of my life’ — was completely different to what I had imagined, with no opportunities for socialising or to ‘make the most of it’.

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My mental health has fluctuated throughout my time at university partly due to the overwhelming stress that comes with doing a degree.

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As reported by Collier for Top Universities, “Natwest Student Living Index 2019 have been released [...] and demonstrate that almost half [of UK students] (45 percent) are feeling stressed by their course”. This statistic becomes even more shocking once you release this was from before the pandemic.

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The pandemic has brought added worries such as online learning, new ways of working, and pressure to perform well to get a job in a post-pandemic graduate job market. When all of these act together, or even individually, it’s inevitable that students will be stressed.

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Despite knowing that it’s okay not to be okay and to reach out for help, I still felt, and continue to feel, immense guilt for not having the supposed best time of my life that I ‘should’ have had.

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Modern university experiences also bring with them the added complication of social media which, as much as it can elevate networking and communicating at university, it can also be used as a space for toxic comparison where everyone only shares their highlight reel.

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When everyone truly does seem to be having the time of their life, that guilt can creep in again, making me feel like I should be too.

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University can be the best years of your life, but it’s okay if they aren’t.

It is okay if you’re struggling with mental illness, or if you’re simply not enjoying it as much as you thought you would.

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The narrative surrounding university pressurises us into believing that these three years will define us for the rest of our lives and, if we don’t make the most of it, then we have wasted an opportunity.

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I’m here to tell you that if you don’t have the best three years of your life, there will be other opportunities.

You have the rest of your whole life ahead of you!

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For a long time, I believed that my mental health struggles at university, coupled with the pandemic, had ruined my university experience and, subsequently, the best years of my life.

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Whilst I realise that it is okay to grieve for the missed opportunities at university that came with the pandemic — whether that be missed social time, lack of opportunity to make life-long friends, missed career opportunities or in-person teaching time — I also recognise that it’s okay that my university experience hasn’t lived up to the “best years of your life” expectation that I have been fed my entire life.

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These three years have been a mixture of emotions and, despite the pandemic, I’ve tried to make the most of university. However, I know that post-graduation life, where I will hopefully be studying Journalism, also offers the same opportunity for the best years of my life that university promised me.