Beyond the University Viewbook
By: Joshua Grondin
No one tells you how difficult university life is and how it will affect your mental health.
Content Warning: mental illness, financial insecurity, sexual assault/violence, and campus suicide
The time is coming — you stand with a packed bag in the middle of your driveway, waiting to make a move that you hope will change your life. Tuition has been paid, your courses have been picked, your space in the campus residence has been confirmed, so now what? You’re somewhat familiar with the structure of the university and its various resources — after all, you’ve read your copy of the school’s viewbook several times and even had the chance to speak with the friendly campus tour guides. From here on out it’s supposed to be a smooth ride, one filled with quad lunches and ultimate Frisbee games.
Maybe you were a leader in high school. Perhaps things came naturally and you never really struggled to receive decent grades. You’re a leader, after all, and a leader doesn’t fail. A leader can take on an enormous load of responsibility and challenges, and while they may face stress, they won’t fail. That’s what breeds the best UN ambassadors, engineers, and medical school candidates, right? A leader should not struggle to adapt to university — they’ll quickly become encompassed in student politics on campus, learn to make friends easily, and develop crucial study habits they’ll need to obtain the sought after 4.0.
You make the drive from your home to campus. You unpack your bags, you say goodbye to your family, and just like that, you’re alone to face this new life. You wait anxiously in your room for the start of frosh week, what you’re sure will be a week full of new friendships, wild adventures, and stories you would never tell your parents. But what happens when you realize that this isn’t always the case? What happens as you begin your first few weeks and realize you’ve been spoon-fed a collection of deceiving information and are nothing more than a number within the institution?
Student 1001166285 here. Former law-school hopeful here. Former high school leader and scholarship recipient here, ready to provide what I hope will be a more honest and sincere introduction to university life than you may have otherwise seen. This list is meant to take you beyond the campus viewbook to provide an honest insight about some of the challenges you may face in pursuit of higher education.
Disclaimer: This list is based entirely off of my experience and is not meant to discourage you or make you cynical of post-secondary institutions. As much as I disagree with some of the policies and decisions within my university, I enjoy my school enough to try to advocate for change. I feel strongly enough about some of my experiences to devote myself to ensuring that other students do not have to go through the same things.
1. Frosh week can be very isolating
You hear about the beloved orientation week months in advance of the actual event. You’ll see sponsored posts on Facebook, have your email spammed with information about registering, and be faced with the constant screeches and cheering of the event organizers. Don’t get me wrong — the event certainly deserves credit. For some, it’s a week to celebrate. It’s a week to show pride in your school before the inevitable ambush of course work and responsibilities. It can be a week to develop new friendships and alcohol tolerance, all while getting the vibe that campus can actually be a fun place to be. But for some, it’s isolating, and this is important to acknowledge.
Orientation week comes at a time of great change for the incoming freshmen. It comes alongside your newfound independence, which for many, corresponds to a time of being away from your friends and family for the first extended period of time. It may come at a time when you’re trying to become acquainted with life in a new area: with a new home and without all of the mundane comforts of your traditional life. You might see your friends move on with their lives, spending time with each other without even remembering your existence. You might miss those late nights of your mother yelling at you to go to bed, as you begin your 8th consecutive hour of binge-watching The Office. Your fellow frosh might quickly make close friend groups, while you anxiously wander from group to group trying to find where you best fit. And the worst part, it might take you a while to find this group of people.
High school provides structure — it’s easier to make friends when you’re surrounded by the same people every single day. University breeds independence and frosh week expects energy. It’s certainly not always fun and games.
2. Institutions won’t adequately support mental health
And if you disagree, by all means, please send me the contact information for your psychiatrist and I’ll transfer schools. This is not to say that individuals you will come across do not care… but the institution as a whole will not always be there when you need the support. The number of students in Ontario registered with mental illness disabilities has increased 400% from 2004–2014, but unfortunately, the funding has not. Ignore your conservative uncles — this has nothing to do with our generation being “unable to handle the challenges of real life”. That’s absolute nonsense. What it can be attributed to, however, may be the increased number of working hours by the average student, rising tuition fees that force students to take on enormous debt, high unemployment rates for recent graduates, and fights against stigma that encourage more students to speak up (rather than ignoring concerns and sending folks in need of care to asylums as previous generations did).
Despite your viewbook’s promises of well-equipped counseling services, accessibility services that are actually accessible when you need them, and academic advisers to help navigate campus resources, you’ll be left with a brochure on yoga class and information about a therapy dog en route for all of your dog-petting needs (because yes, major depressive disorder is brought on by a dog-petting deficiency).
The unfortunate truth to the lack of support can be attributed to an extreme lack of funding to mental health and wellness initiatives, where all that can really be provided is basic band-aid fixes that won’t address the root of the problem. You will be encouraged to not seek a second visit. You will be banned once you’ve hit the system quota (6 visits, from my experience). You might even have professors who will refuse to make the most basic accommodations that are detrimental to your well-being.
You’ll find a campus more keen on saving its reputation than providing support to students in crisis, where a student is banned from campus for being suicidal. You’ll find a campus acting stunned that a student would commit suicide in their residence when a “plethora of support services are offered”, refusing to acknowledge month-long wait-lists for psychiatric care. You’ll find a campus that will charge you $100 for missing an appointment, regardless of the reason. Are you a student with a low-income? Screw you, you’re banned from booking appointments until you pay.
Because what they won’t tell you is that as hard as they push to get you to come forward and seek help if you need it, they have created a system that tries to remove you almost immediately. It’s the institution’s way of saying “Look! We helped and they’re still not okay! This is beyond our control now.” And as much as this damn system might constantly try to push you away, you must understand your rights and fight against anything unjust.
Access to health and wellness programs are covered in your incidental fees. It it the university’s responsibility to ensure these fees are being used in a way that benefits the students. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not — but policy is not set.
Policies are not always right, and policies sometimes need to be fought and changed. You can have an effect on this, yes, even as a first-year undergraduate student.
3. Your life plan will change significantly
If I had one LSAT point for every law-school hopeful I met in my first year political science class, I’d probably have enough points to actually get in to law-school myself. Same goes for medical school kids in a first year biology class. Your high school probably forgot to tell you about careers in research (especially social science and humanities research), community service, administration, and basically everything else aside from their 5 example career paths (doctor, lawyer, teacher, engineer, business). They also probably forgot to tell you that thousands and thousands of students around the world share the exact same dream job as you, but majority of you won’t get it. For many people, your interests are simply going to change. You’ll study a topic you thought that you loved and realize that to you, it’s boring as hell once you study it in depth.
For others, you may find that your grades no longer stand out as they did in high school. You’ll be surrounded by so many intellectually gifted people and then before you know it, you’re average. You might not get into your dream graduate program. You might fail the core courses you need for your intended major. You might take an elective that will change your life, and you’ll switch to a program you didn’t even know existed a year earlier. You might find that finishing your degree in four years isn’t what is best for you, and decide to take a fifth, sixth, or gap year to finish. Hell, you might decide not to finish or to transfer to a different school.
Looking back at high school, it all seems so trivial. The courses I took are nothing like they are at the university level. Maybe my high school was unique, but my math classes were actually engaging and things like philosophy didn’t even exist. We didn’t really study any topics in depth, the essays were 1/3 the size of the crap I had to write in my first year, and it was normal to have teachers that cared about my success (now it’s just a pleasant surprise). But university is a time of change and self-exploration. It’s a time of coming to terms with what you actually enjoy doing, what you actually excel in, and where your weaknesses are. These realizations might come with panic and a series of mid-life crises; they can be overwhelming and discouraging. Your plan will likely change, and that’s okay.
4. Say good-bye to financial security
Obviously this one won’t apply to everyone — U of T (University of Toronto) especially has its fair share of millionaire students driving Range Rovers to campus as I’m collecting dimes from under my bed to pay for the damn bus. All jokes aside, for the average student, you will need to learn to budget your money carefully and you’ll quickly discover that even with the most extreme budgets, you still might not have enough money left at the end of the day. Tuition prices go up every single year, a Toronto living-room used as a bedroom will cost you $800/month, healthy foods are not affordable, you get the point? Students work now more than ever, but with so many damn expenses it doesn’t even matter at the end of the day. I’m privileged enough to still be able to enjoy the occasional night out with my buddies, but money is still always on my mind. (Particularly due to the fact that I don’t really have much of it).
And like I said, I’m relatively privileged in this regard. For many students, post-secondary education means taking on enormous debt (i.e: $43,000 tuition for international students at U of T this year), relying on food banks to eat, sleeping in the 24-hour library or on a friend’s couch, missing class due to the high cost of using public transit, not being able to spend hundreds of dollars on course textbooks, and student loans and bursaries aren’t sufficient enough to help.
Universities were made for the wealthy, and they remain this way today. These institutions are not run with the needs of low-income students in mind, and quite frankly, they won’t really care about your financial situation.
And many students who struggle had secure savings accounts in high school, but had difficulties managing money alongside the liberty of independence. Many students are the first in their family to attend post-secondary and had to work so damn hard to get here. Address these issues on your campus. Address them with your students’ union who can fight for fairness. Take a year off to work if you think it would help you. Demand to be paid for the efforts of your labour (this is at you: musicians, artists, social justice advocates).
Our fight for fair tuition and housing prices is never-ending, and the millionaire president of your school who calls the shots is not going to give a damn about school affordability.
You’ve worked hard to get here. You belong here, regardless of your ability to pay. The student movement will fight to get you through.
5. Campus and Life don’t always go together
Your viewbook is plagued with photos of a diverse group of students eating lunch on a blanket in your school quad. Turn the page, you have information about all of the unique clubs your school has to offer, each eager to welcome new members at any point throughout the year. Flip the page once again and see details about the various support centers on campus, creating the false belief that your identity will always be respected and valued. Flip once more and see details on campus police, making you believe that things like sexual assault and targeted violence will actually be taken seriously on campus. That’s a huge load of crap, and you deserve to know.
Despite being considered a “breeding ground of liberalism”, your institution likely has a longstanding history of issues with sexism, racism, classism, and ableism.
Even worse, these ideas are often embedded in the very policies meant to protect you and within the beliefs of those meant to represent you. You might find that your school is complicit in cases of rape and sexual violence on campus, more concerned with protecting the identity and the potential of the rapist, rather than supporting the victim of the assault. You might find that you campus does not intervene in the presence of hate speech that puts you at danger, nor does it work to actively involve disenfranchised students and marginalized folks.
You might struggle to find that group of people you’d want to spend a Friday night with. You might not find a club that is in line with your interests. You might find a group that does not respect or desire your presence. It will suck. You will have your ideas and beliefs be questioned and challenged and you will not always be respected. You will be turned away by people you respect and admire. You will learn. You will unlearn. You will be exposed to alternative views and other sides of a debate. But eventually, you will find your place.
Because in the end, there is a lot that I wish I knew before I came to university. I wish people were honest with me. I wish they told me that things would not always be perfect, and that I would face constant setbacks, failure, and uncomfortable change. I wish they told me that I could be removed from accessing counseling services. I wish they told me that I could have a professor refuse a medical note on the basis of it being a mental rather than a physical illness. I wish they told me that I’d be broke as hell. I wish they told me I would hate frosh week and would want to move back home when I first came. I wish they told me that I wouldn’t have the grades to take the programs and courses I wanted.
But there’s more they didn’t tell me. They didn’t tell me that I would make best friends that would change my life and get me through some of the hardest days. They wouldn’t tell me that I’d have a roommate that would wait with me at the hospital for 10 hours the day before one of his exams. They didn’t tell me I’d meet administration who invite me to their office for a cup of coffee to chat and catch up. They didn’t tell me I would have TAs sit with me for hours to practice my Spanish before an upcoming oral presentation. They didn’t tell me I would join clubs that would teach me more than any class ever could. They didn’t tell me how much I would grow as a person and how confident I would become in the few skills I actually think I have. They didn’t tell me about the interest and passion I would develop in education and mental health.
They didn’t tell me I’d go from an eager and pretentious first-year student to a cynical fourth-year.
Do I have problems with my school? Hell yeah, but I think I’ve made that clear enough. In the end, I chose this place for a reason and would rather spend every day fighting for rightful change than remain complicit. You have the right to be treated with dignity and respect, the right to advocate for policy reform, and the right to enjoy your time.
So here it is — The things I wish I knew and the things I’ve never been told.
Cheers to the upcoming year.
