School taught me how to be a student. Forever. Not an ‘adulty’ adult.

The summer before starting my third year at university, has certainly been an interesting one. Despite the lovely holiday I had with my boyfriend, which was fun and most definitely relaxing and refreshing, it has been quite stressful. Both of us have been constantly worried about workloads and deadlines that didn’t exist from the end of May onwards, having panic attacks about the reading list that hadn’t been released till mid-August, and refreshing the ‘personalized time table’ page twice a day in case you missed something important. The excitement I had every year as a child and teenager for the ‘going back to school’ season, though still very much present, has been over shadowed by the sheer terror of what will come in the next nine months of my academic career.

The last two years have already seen the hair pulling nervousness of deadlines, portfolios, and fluffing out word counts. University has left me with new purple bags underneath my eyes, higher caffeine levels in my blood than haemoglobin, and a fear of the words ‘due’, ‘dead’, ‘line’, and ‘referencing’. However this coming year has added a new adversary to my sleeping patterns. A word students hate more than anything, that makes them hiss, cower under their beds crying, resort to smacking their heads’ off of desks asking whatever controlled the universe “why me?”. The Dissertation.

Since early in high school, we’ve heard the word ‘dissertation’ and been reminded about how it’s one of the hardest pieces of work we’ll ever have to produce, even if it was just a comment in passing, we’d be reminded of how lowly and lucky we are to never have had to write a dissertation yet. We had years of essay writing, end of year exams, group presentations (that to this day will make introverts and recluses quake with fear, even if they have transformed the knack for not vomiting into a fine art form), and handing homework in on time… mostly. But those of us who decided to slog it out through university, who signed up for days after days of all-nighters, sold our souls and first born children to Student finance, are prepared for the onslaught. What we aren’t prepared for, is the ‘real world’ things we have to do before our final grades determine what we do from there on in.

What would have been useful to learn in high school and sixth form would’ve been very simple real life grown-up things that we could apply once we head towards the close of academia. What was not helpful to learn in school was what Tim has after buying fifteen mars bars at 45p, and seven twixes at 55p. Dear AQA, Diabetes. Tim has diabetes. Since finishing GCSE maths, very pleased and proud of my A, I have never once used Pythagorean theorem, done anything other than bake or eat Pi(e), or had to find the value of ex — we both moved on. I’ve never once used the nth degree for anything, other than over exaggerating a point, and I don’t think I’ve ever had to calculate the degree of an angle. Granted, all of these are especially pointless for an English student. It would’ve been more useful to teach a group of 16 year olds how to balance a budget, save money, understand interest and bank clauses, understand over drafts, debt and inflation rates, and to have a basic comprehension on what tax is and how the hell it works.

Schools, though boasting their prowess based on GCSE and A-level results, fail to prepare the new generations for what being an adult will smack them in the face with. We are told repeatedly that we need to know how to write a CV and a personal statement; we are told once and only once how to do this, probably very briefly during the end of term cool off during or just after end of year exams, and it is never touched upon again. We’re told that we should do DofE because it’ll be beneficial to getting into universities and being given job offers. I am yet to see someone with a DofE certificate be told anything other than “That’s nice” by a university professor when the student mentions their three nights camping with teachers and other screaming teenagers. Student debt is touched upon briefly during sixth form, but not in enough detail to fully prepare us all for the sudden shock of putting ourselves in to at least (without interest) £27,000 of debt for the tuition alone. It would be more beneficial to explain council tax, insurance, and MOTs, rather than the life span of rocks and the formation of a river.

When we were younger, we were always told to enjoy our teenage years, “they’re the best in your life”. This is true. Completely true. Because we lived in sweet, blissful ignorance of what being a young adult would entail; which is mainly wondering if selling a kidney would cover our student loans, looking like frightened rabbits in headlights, and trying to find an adult when things go wrong, only to discover that you ARE the adult. A totally ill prepared adult, knowing more about Marxist theories and their applications to literature of the 1920s than about the appropriate way to cook chicken safely, and reverting to toddler like behaviour, napping in the library and not wanting to share the milk in the flat fridge.