It’s a strange period of life where you are somehow both the most independent and the most confused you have ever been. You learn how to cook, or at least how to convince yourself that the slop you’re making resembles instant noodles. You learn how to manage money, usually first by mismanaging it. You learn how to live with deadlines, group projects, nonexistent sleep schedules, and the constant feeling that everyone around you knows what they are doing better than you do.
And yet, for all its chaos, university also has a way of becoming one of the most meaningful chapters of your life.
The Best of Times
The best times in college don’t always announce themselves. They’re not always the big parties, the perfect grades, or the major achievements, though these can be wonderful too. Sometimes, the best moments are much smaller: lying down on a patch of grass with your friends after a long day, sitting in front of the Gallery building overlooking the rain and getting lost in conversation, or walking home at night with music in your ears and the feeling that, somehow, life is beginning to look up.
There is something special about the freedom of student life. For many people, university is the first time in their lives where they get to build something meaningful, something that is truly their own. You choose your friends, your routines, your hobbies, your mistakes, and sometimes, rarely, your definition of dinner. You get to discover what kind of person you are when nobody is watching too closely. You get to try new things, fail at them, try again, and slowly realise that failure is not the end of the world.
University is where ordinary places become sentimental. A library table becomes ‘your spot’. A specific chair in Technohal becomes the place where everything feels at peace. A bike path through nature becomes the road that you daydream on. Even the weather is a thousand times more potent: you cherish the sunny days, you curse the wind, and yet who knew the rain could be so pretty? Before you know it, the campus stops being just a campus. It gradually becomes a map of your life, a collection of memories.
But of course, it’s not always beautiful.
The Worst of Times
The worst times in university can feel incredibly lonely. This is one of the things people don’t always talk about. University is often seen as exciting, social, and full of opportunity, and it can be all of those things. But it can also be isolating – you can be surrounded by people and still feel invisible. You can be sitting in a crowded lecture hall and realise that you’re falling behind. You can scroll through photos of everyone else seemingly having the time of their lives while you are in your room, eating a sad dinner and wondering if you are doing university wrong.
Then there is the pressure. The pressure to perform, to pass, to plan your future, to make friends, to be interesting, to be productive, to make the most of every opportunity. At times, college can feel less like a coming-of-age story and more like a to-do list. There are weeks when deadlines pile up, your laundry becomes its own ecosystem, when the sun seldom shines, and the rain is suddenly suffocating you, who knew the rain could be so cold? There are weeks in college when you feel like you are drowning.
Perhaps the hardest part of college is that it forces you to change before you are ready. Friendships shift. Relationships begin and end. Homesickness appears at strange times. All of a sudden, your parents start looking older, your old friends have stopped communicating, and you’re not allowed to grieve what you must because life must go on. Growing up, unfortunately, doesn’t happen in a 10-second quick montage with filters and bubbles around your person. More often, it happens while you are tired, overwhelmed, and trying to submit something before 23:59.
An age of wisdom
Still, there is something to be retrieved from these worst of times, too. These times teach you a different kind of knowledge than the one found in the lecture slides. You learn resilience. You learn to ask for help. You learn that resting is not laziness. You learn that everyone is struggling with something, even the people who seem impossibly put together. You learn that being lost is not the same as being hopeless.
Perhaps that is why college feels so intense. It compresses so much of life into such a short, fleeting time. You’re studying, working, socialising, failing, succeeding, changing, and becoming – all at once. No wonder it feels dramatic. No wonder Dickens fits.
The best and worst of times during college are often closer together than we expect. The same week can contain a horrible exam, a beautiful conversation, a mental breakdown, a new friendship, one coffee too much, and one tiny moment that makes everything feel worth it. University is not black and white. It is messy, exhausting, funny, lonely, wonderful, absurd, and occasionally held together by duct tape and hope.
So maybe Ludwig is right. College truly is an experience like no other. Not because it is either always the best of times or the worst of times, but because it is often both. It is a time of contradictions: freedom and pressure, loneliness and community, confusion and discovery, and stagnation and change. And somewhere between all of these antonyms, you grow.
