Take Me Back to the Age of Fresh

     Someone pointed out to me that first year of university is wasted on the Freshers and as I work-out, tired third year, I'd have to agree. Dissertations are hard, the sort of difficulty that no amount of time will ever prepare you for. The modules are a similar level of impossibility, with blagging no longer an easy option, although you can wiggle through some pretty tight gaps. You are stressed ALL OF THE TIME. You are tired ALL OF THE TIME. You even go to bed at a respectable time and get up at the crack of dawn to write more on your introduction, or to plan you data collection, or something equally soul crushing.

     You watch the baby-faced first years saunter in, all wide-eyed and eager as they take scope of their halls and the bars and the clubs. You glare at them as they finish their two day week at lunch and head home or to somewhere full of fun and freedom. You grumble as they make racquet in the library, or hold up the entire student body at a door they can't seem to open. They are everything you want to be, except they are rubbish at it.

     Freshers are unprepared and their ignorance to student life stops them from getting the most out of first year, but by the time you realise how to be a student proper, it's too late. You are twenty going on twenty-one, in your final year, headed towards panicked deadlines and job prospects. You no longer have the freedom you once had, although you have the plans and ideas you once lacked.

     It's cruel twist of fate that when you have time to do things, you have nothing to do and when you things to do, you have no time to do them in.

     Apparently this is a syndrome known as student pensioner. I am a student pensioner. I wish I could relive my first year and do all the things I didn't do and be all the things I never was. Except I know in my heart of hearts that if I did go back to first year, I'd probably end up doing exactly the same things I did the first time. I can't help it. It's just me. 

     So now I'm wrung out and jaded, watching those baby Freshers as they waste what could have been a brilliant year into one of learning the rope, regardless of what they say.