Graduating in a Year of Lost Opportunities
When I went back to university this semester, it was already on shaky terms. Uni and I, we’ve always had a bit of love-hate relationship. Add in a pandemic, a cancelled semester abroad, the fact that the majority of my friends have already graduated and a heavy study load and yeah, you can guess which side of that scale my feelings are leaning towards.
I took a break after the end of 2019 because of what I thought was a brilliant plan at the time. I would defer my degree for half a year, work full time and save up so that I could spend my second semester abroad in Denmark. It sounds like a clichéd Eat Pray Love experience, but it was going to be my clichéd Eat Pray Love experience and I had been looking forward to it for many years. Unlike the US, it is far more commonplace for university students in Australia to stay at home until they graduate, and like many others, I was living at home at the time and keen to finally taste ‘adulthood’ and ‘independence’.
Getting offered a place on the exchange program was my motivation through the last few years of my degree.
Whilst I was never a 4.0 GPA kind of girl before, I sure as hell decided to turn myself into one so that I could have a chance at being selected. If my life were a film, this is where Eye of the Tiger would start playing over a montage of me spending hours trying to understand what judges were saying, or perhaps one of me crying over a textbook in various locations. I’ll spare you the nuts and bolts and leave you with this one guiding ‘how’ — turns out academic success and hard work really are correlated. But my plan did work, and I was offered a place at the University of Copenhagen for the Fall Semester this year.
In that time I took off, the pandemic reached a turning point in March 2020. I was working full time and the majority of my friends were completing the final semester of their degree when it became apparent that coronavirus was not just the flu 2.0. Australia watched as Wuhan went into lockdown, Lombardy not long after. We watched as outbreaks popped up across Asia, Europe and the US, as the numbers at home began to tick upwards as well. By late March we had joined the rest of the world in lockdown.
At the time, I thought, ‘Surely modern medicine will fix this by June? July latest?’
Wrong. So laughably wrong. Thank god I wasn’t organised enough to book my plane tickets and accommodation well in advance.
Fast forward a few months and here I am. The season’s weather is inordinately warm, a tribute to the climate change which led to a devastating bushfire season last summer. It’s shaping up to be another unseasonably hot and dry summer; sunbathers were gathered in the park today, on a sweat inducing September day. I’m taking classes I enjoy, but which I am not very good at, or at least I feel that way. I have quit the job which felt like a necessary lifeline to me during the first half a year; the fine line between affording the luxury of fun and surviving on bread every day in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I counted my blessings that I am back on campus, even if it lacks the many friendly faces who have been there with me throughout our degrees.
As I retell this, I realise this is the first time I have genuinely examined my feelings around this lost opportunity. When people offered their sympathies, I didn’t feel like I could indulge it much. It’s a pandemic, for Christ’s sake, people are dying. If there were a sympathy hierarchy, the last rung would be for the privileged whose biggest problem was missing out on the opportunity to find themselves in Europe.
And yet, I feel the loss of a formative moment in this chapter of my life. I wish I could be stoic, and offer sage advice to look past the fact that I feel hard-done by the pandemic while knowing fully well that there are those who are clearly worse off. But quashing those feelings hasn’t worked and so I want to shine a light on them and break them apart under a mirror. I feel the loss of a formative moment in this chapter of my life, when the edges of my identity are still a little jagged and I have no clue what I want to do but am about to be churned out of the tertiary education factory into the corporate world nonetheless.
When I was in high school, English Lit was my favourite class. In one class we read Jorge Luís Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, a story about a labyrinth with an infinite number of paths which coexisted at once. The overarching metaphor of the labyrinth representing the ‘what-ifs’ in our lives plays on my mind here. Time after time, I find myself clinging to this idea that perhaps I can have it all, even as I watch the doors close. In an ever-increasingly capitalist world where everything we do is about self-optimisation, a college degree is a streamlined means to a cushy white collar job. Gone are the days when there was a more even playing ground, as the gap between the income earning capacity of college grads and those without widens. Once you’re at college, it becomes about getting the grades and extracurriculars and internships and work experience in order to convince a recruiter by your final year that you are indeed worthy of being selected to file and scan some papers at a multinational corporate. Grades are given out according to a bell curve, any job you apply for wants you to have years of experience, unpaid internships are the norm. It’s a rat race through and through.
I’m not a runner. I’m far too inelegant. My right foot kicks outward at a funny angle and I have the lung capacity of a human half my size. And still, I have been running this race for the past five years. I feel burned out. I don’t really know if I like the person I am becoming or the priorities I have decided are my own. I can’t help but worry that where I start will determine where I end, and that I have already put myself down a path that will be very difficult to get off.
Copenhagen was going to be my pause button, six months of novel experiences and life and reflecting on what is, was and ought to be. It wasn’t meant to be something I did for my future career, it was meant to be for fun. It was meant to be the clichéd amalgamation of everything I had hoped to learn as a young adult; how to think for myself, say yes to weird opportunities, to live in a foreign country, to do things I was terrified to do, to be a hedonist and not feel damn guilty every second of the way. I couldn’t wait to navigate foreign public transport systems and get lost along the way. I couldn’t wait to travel by myself, something which I have always been terrified of doing.
2020 was not the year for any of that. For the graduating class of 2020, it was a year of missed opportunities: travel plans and job opportunities just among a few on the list. It has been a year for surviving, not thriving. We should count our blessings and air our grievances, however small either may be.
