Third year fear

Final year fear

By Lloyd Henning

The fear is there every moment of final year. Hanging in the air of the lecture theatres, festering within the pages of dissertations and lurking within the meat of end-of-the-night kebabs. It is the fear of the head honcho of horrors awaiting all students at the end of university – real life.

Striking like a kipper to the cheeks, the fear consumed me when I realised the insignificance of exam worries compared to the impending doom of graduation in six months time, after which I’ll have to actually prove I’m better than all those school-days acquaintances whose life choices I have been smugly mocking from the relative safety of the Internet.

University has been full of relatively trivial questions compared to “what plans do you have for next year?”, to which common responses from the student body are “trying to remember year 8 maths pass the assessment centre for a graduate scheme”, “holding off responsibility and doing a masters” or my personal choice: “exploring a few promising avenues, but not commting to anything at this point in time” – which is a nice way of saying “I’m fucked”.

Years of pretending to be a member of the intelligentsia has left me completely ill prepared for the world of working for the weekend. There will be no more three month holidays, no more weekday siestas, and living in a mold ridden slum won’t be indicative of being an academic roughing it, but instead a clear sign of a peasant rotting in its own filth.

My previous experience work has been stacking shelves whilst thanking god that, due to my investment in education, I wasn’t going to be stuck pricing down crumpets for the rest of my life. However, come July it will be time to find a real job, and if that’s miserable then I will become one of the miserable full-timers, I’ll probably have to take up golf to deal with the grief.

Then again I don’t necessarily have to get a job, there is always the option to live at home with mum and spend the rest of my life playing mario kart in my pants. The dole is always an option; in fact one graduate I recently met said that it was a great way to live, he got enough to cover his rent and support his penchant for narcotics, although I’m not sure if that’s the most sustainable lifestyle.

I believe the safest plan for the future one can have involves forgetting about going for a dream career or trying to do something that is believed to be meaningful; instead just sell-out and start investing in your midlife crisis. Go design a missile system, market some radioactive sweets to kids, sell some defective pacemakers and most importantly get paid loads. That way when you finally do go bonkers with all the guilt, shame and disappointment of a wasted existence, at least you will have the capital to do something interesting – I’m planning on buying a model village, exotic reptiles and combining them for a 1/16th scale Jurassic park.

For now I have six months to squeeze the last bit of enjoyment out of the arid flannel of student life, and at the same time do the most difficult, time-consuming part of my degree. I find no comfort in the fact that I’m probably not alone in my fearful state, maybe we are a generation destined to become stay-at-home underwear gamers.