Interesting that you found uni helped you as a person and not just as a student/academic. I think that's what all courses should aspire to, but when they can't even live up to the latter, it makes it tough to justify overall. Out of curiousity, was there anything that precipitated that change for you at the end of your first year? Was it just a shift in attitude, or did you find that the subjects/ teaching/ environment did actually change at that point?
I really had to think about this (on the way to uni, coincidentally). Here are some random thoughts:
At the time, I largely considered high school as merely a means to an end. I was doing it not necessarily because I enjoyed it or deemed it worthwhile, but because it was necessary to get into uni (which I hoped to be enjoyable and worthwhile). The way I see it, there isn’t as much potential to fully embrace high school as there is uni – you’re there five days a week, you have classes pretty much all day, and then you have assignments, SACs and exams to worry about. It’s also generally a pretty big year, what with friendship groups and work and whatever else.
I suppose during my first year of uni, my mindset hadn’t changed. I still saw work (as in uni work/study) as simply a means to an end. But one that
had changed, and that was the fact that I no longer knew what the end was. So I got into uni – great, now what? I had no career direction, I didn’t know what to study, and I had three years before me of an Arts degree. Arts degrees, as we all know, aren’t exactly couched as the clearest pathway to ensured employment.
As a result (and probably due to other things, too), I was a bit down in the dumps. But in the years since, I’ve started to see uni as an end in itself, and I think that that has been really, really helpful for me. I still don’t really know what I’ll end up doing, or even what I
want to end up doing, but that’s okay. I don’t really need to at this point. Instead, I started to engage more with the work at hand, started to really think about it, and ended up enjoying it a whole bunch more. My results improved, too.
I’m not saying that I absolutely threw myself into uni life, because I didn’t. I’m still very withdrawn and don’t often talk to people outside of (or evening during) class. But I joined a couple of clubs, started volunteering a bit, and all of a sudden, uni is something that I do rather than something that I
have to do. It’s a pretty subtle distinction, I guess, but for me it’s had a big impact.
Travelling was probably good for perspective, too. I tended to always come back to Melbourne refreshed and really ready to smash some essays and progress through my degree. I’ve been pretty lucky in this regard – exchange was also great for similar reasons.
Perhaps like high school, too, I’ve found that the further I’ve got through uni, the more specific my gaze has become. You can sort of think of Year 7/8/9 as an analogue of first year uni, in which you’re sort of testing the waters of a lot of subjects. It’s somewhat forced upon you in high school, but you’re still pretty likely to study a wide range of things in your first year (speaking from personal experience, here; it will clearly change from degree to degree). It’s natural that you’ll like some of these more than others. For example, I seemed to like Linguistics and International Studies more than Psychology and Human Rights Theory. Because of that, I majored in Linguistics and International Studies. Of those two options, I enjoyed Linguistics more, so now I’m doing Honours in Linguistics.
Within Linguistics, I enjoy sociolinguistics/discourse analysis more than ‘formal’ linguistics, so that’s what I’m focusing on in my thesis. And so it goes, becoming more and more specific directly in line with your interest(s). So that has probably helped.
I’ve also become more interested in the lives of my professors. That’s sounds a bit stalkery, but I hope it doesn’t come across as
too abnormal. The reason for this is that I gradually became more interested in a career in academia, and my professors sort of act as motivation and/or guidance toward that. In that my career aspirations have gradually become less murky, the lack of direction that I mentioned earlier sort of subsided. It’s still there, but not as prominent. I also became more familiar with the whole university life, which in many ways is quite different to high school. That took some adjusting.
I think my personality, too, is pretty vulnerable to something along the lines of the mere exposure effect. That is, the more I’m exposed to something, the more I identify with or enjoy it. It happened in high school – Year 12 was significantly better than any other year. It happened with work – I didn’t particularly enjoy it until I had been there for a few years (nothing else really changed). And it’s happened with uni – each year has been better than the last. Part of this, perhaps, is the physical connection. I never really went to uni in my first year, opting to listen to my lectures and whatnot. This will change for each individual, but I’ve found that actually attending my lectures has been useful insofar as I now feel more connected to my degree. Sounds a bit wanky, sure, but it’s true.
You could probably contend that my mental state had something to do with the whole thing, too, but that is very much a chicken and egg scenario.
P.S. Lauren, you are the master of humorous GIFs.