My Favourite Boomer Lie

By Rose Dixon-Campbell

There was a period of about three months in between my finishing Year 12 and moving away from home for university in which I worked at a little café nearly every day. The patrons were mostly baby boomers who, by the end of my term there, came to know me quite well and were very interested in my future plans.

I was fortunate to receive three months of unsolicited advice and anecdotes about university from these regulars. My young age and university plans made them incredibly nostalgic for the glamour, romance, and unadulterated, chaotic fun of studying in the 70s and 80s. I kept hearing one statement again and again, and it really set my hopes high.

“Your years at university will be the best of your life.”

As I write this I am staring down the barrel of third year. I have ‘done uni’ seemingly every way one can. I have lived on campus and off. Done in person learning and zoom university. I have catastrophically failed and relished in my HDs. I have been stressed, distraught, overwhelmed, inspired, jubilant, content, and everything in between, and I feel qualified to say that the statement above is absolutely untrue.

Or at least I hope it’s not. Desperately.

If the anxiety, angst, and nihilism which seem to define my early 20s, coupled with the stress of being perpetually strapped for cash, working part-time, and studying full-time is the peak of my life’s enjoyment, then that is a bleak prognosis indeed.

This statement carries an inherent glamorisation of youth of course, however the truth is that not everyone enjoys being young and not everyone enjoys university. Your years at uni will not be a waste just because you failed to have a crazy good time every day. And it certainly does not have to be the case that the rest of your life will only be more boring just because you have left your uni days behind.

Truthfully, I hated my first year of university. I had no friends, I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing ever, I was overwhelmed and unimpressed by my degree and I was very, very far from home. Granted, my second year was markedly better. I was older, wiser, and perhaps most importantly, I had far lower expectations. That glamorous lie parroted to me by boomers had well and truly proved itself a myth by that point.

I do enjoy a lot of things about university. I also dislike a lot of things about university, and you probably do too. There is no reason why the things we enjoy about uni should end when we leave it. I am certainly not going to stop going to the pub with mates just because I graduated, and neither should you.

However, I will stop begging professors for extensions and stressing over essays and lectures and readings when I graduate. I am really, really looking forward to that day.