Rachel Lavin-
There has been a series of unexplained disappearances in Halls lately. Every once in a while you’ll enquire after that friend of a friend’s flat-mate who you had a seriously drunken DMC with one night, to find they too have mysteriously evaporated into the polluted Dublin air. Not only that, but lately something seems off in Halls. There’s a tense atmosphere of anxiety, with much emotional and stressful contemplation. This week your reporter went all CSI Halls to find out. Was the ‘Temple Road Pedophile’ abducting our freshers in his rumoured ‘red car’ or had the Warden set up a Fritzl-inspired basement underneath Oldham? As it turns out, no–what’s a student reporter got to do for a bit of drama around here? It is the ever-growing trend of freshers dropping-out, reapplying and questioning their choices. Students start to realise their courses aren’t what they thought they’d be, they want something more, or less, or simply different. For most, we’re starting to question what it is we want at all.
As this term rolled around, many freshers stepped back off the 128 bus (R.I.P.) with this exact burden. With every week comes another goodbye party, an empty room and a fragmented vision of the future. Of course, there’s nothing worse than realising you’re in the wrong place. Especially when you’re six months in, ten grand worse off, with a tight group of friends and some pretty epic memories to boot, memories you thought you’d never stop making. Not least to the prospect of returning home to the nosy locals, who as one friend quoted, “Oh, so you’re that girl who used to go to Trinity.” and “Taking a little holiday are we?”
With the H-Pat being sat last Saturday in Goldsmith Hall, over the course of a week ten close friends reveal themselves to be taking it. The freshers crisis is contagious and lately I even catch the bug. I start to question that randomly assorted CAO list. No.2 Human Nutrition, no. 4 Law, no. 7 nursing, no. 8 Advertising and Marketing. It’s when faced with such a random mixture of future possibilities that joke no. 10’s jam-making in Carlow never seemed so tempting. Oh the sweet life I could have on the Aran Islands, picking berries, wearing Aran jumpers, (the fashion now anyway) drinking porter and talking about the ‘ra.
Whatever about fantasizing over Aran life, there’s times when I even long to return to the auld Leaving Cert. Yes, life was simple then, when your biggest worry was who to bring to the Debs and your biggest achievement, breaking that sub teacher, all the while being mammied with proper dinners, clean clothes and Leaving Cert sympathy.
But no, now we’re adults (begrudgingly) and no sooner have you blown those eighteen candles than you have to make the biggest decision of your life…what to do with it. So we looked at the prospectuses, the salaries and the employment prospects and signed, sealed and delivered the CAO. So what happened? What went wrong? Why, if we aren’t dropping out or reapplying are we are still questioning our choices. The re-application bug, for me, reached fever pitch this week. What with work piling up like there’s no tomorrow (did I not sign up for an arts degree here?) and morale low, I contemplate an easier life, something different, something more exotic or more specifically, the life of a Hamilton student. I should have done science or something-therapy or maybe even medicine. Yes, Dr. Rachel, why didn’t I think of that?! Much better than the planned Mrs. Dr. Rachel Husband…
Suddenly I’m looking at these left-brained folk in a new light. Yes, we see these enigmatic creatures rushing through the Arts Block stacked high with books and lab coats, on their way down to the mysterious metropolis that is the Hamilton, tucked away in the further end of college.
Now I see something new, not the previously assumed dull, tracksuit clad and relentlessly nerdy types. They cross the threshold of the Arts Block every day with but a fleeting glance at us helpless souls, even their walk exudes employability, job security, a high wage and an easy life. Taken in by their trance, I follow this type to their hidden oasis of job prospects.
This takes me to ‘the other side’. I cross nervously over the no-man’s land that is the rugby pitches feeling paranoid that I clearly don’t belong, afraid any second now someone will scream “Arts student” at me and I’ll be chased away by a scalpel-wielding mob. Courageously I persevere and venture where I have never gone before, beyond the Pav, beyond the world of Arts and Humanities, skinny jeans and stylish quiffs, and ‘fashion’ glasses. I enter the world of the science students, infatuated by lab coats, tracksuit bottoms, and real prescription glasses. I am in awe as I stand in the shadow of the magnificent Hamilton Building, with people passing me (in a hurry!) on the way to lectures or ‘labs’ (the new thing down here). I pass by these laboratories and stop and stare in the window like a crazed stalker, in awe of the goggles, white coats, weird Tupperware and strange liquids, giving me flashbacks to my childhood’s beloved ‘Pinky and the Brain’.
I continue my adventure, wandering inside the automatic doors as if I’m entering Narnia. It’s enchanting, like a different world. Even the architecture differs. Here the walls are not just plastered but painted, the luxury! It’s like a mixture between a shopping center with its wide corridors, glass roof and buzz, and a hospital, with plants everywhere, plastic floors and the smell of anti-septic. It’s…clean! The floor is sparkling as rays of sun beam through the roof. This whole building seems to be a metaphor of the bright and optimistic futures it’s students hold. I soon realise I am far from the dark and grungy areas of the arts block.
Everything is in top shape, there’s no litter, cluttered wall space, damaged furniture, or dodgy wiring hanging from the roofs. Even the bathrooms are comparatively luxurious (then again, a port-a-loo on the third day of Oxygen would be comparatively luxurious to Arts Block toilets).
Yes, it’s suddenly clear as I breathe in Hamilton air, oh the sweet smell of intellect, that this is where I’m meant to be. No more forming opinions and reading Chaucer and general procrastination in the name of insight for me. No, perhaps medicine is my future. I mean, how hard can it be? Just like Grey’s Anatomy—bitta saving lives here, entertaining illnesses there, and Dr. McDreamys? Yes please! Plus baby blue scrubs would go great with my eyes.
Yes, that’s the life for me, none of this silly journalism craic.
But amidst my life-changing decision-making, I start to notice little things. It’s quiet and subdued, eerily so, people are rushing to class determinedly and there is simply no loitering, no pointless banter, no body passed out in a deep sleep coma in a corner, no events tables, no buzz…I suddenly feel lonesome.
Then, the biggest shocker of all. It takes me a while to notice it, initially surpassing my observations, but then it hits me, winds me, I gasp for air as I realise, THERE ARE NO COUCHES.
None, not one to be found, I search the entire first floor, and even upstairs. I eventually give up hope. I just can’t contemplate it, where do they sleep off their hangovers? Where do they procrastinate away lectures, devour the paper, and talk about beautifully pointless shite with philosophy students. No, it cannot be.
That’s when something even more horrendous enters my sight. Benches. Small square wooden benches, hideously practical and with no chance of engraving your groove there, almost as if there’s no time even for sitting down!?
Just when I think this is all too much I look to these benches assorted around a table and gasp in horror. There are a group of students intently gathered around a table…playing Yu-Gi-Oh!
I’d seen enough. I go to leave and find an exit – it’s surprisingly easy to get out which is startling to me. No finding your way through clouds of passive smoke as gaggles of smokers loiter. Of course not, they’re healthy down here too. No hearing ridiculous snippets of conversation such as the “problem with China” and “what a legend Charlie Sheen is.”
No wondering at the terrible beauty that is arts fashion, just the same navy trackie bottoms everywhere. I suddenly would give anything for the cringey sight of overtly tight skinny jeans. What is coming over me?
The worst part is, I can’t get out of the maze of buildings. There’s alleyways, computer cabins, and then, the anatomy building. This disturbs me. It’s full of dead bodies in there. And yes of course, I understand it’s all for beneficial reasons (even though, don’t be surprised if after signing up to donate your body to TCD Medical research you get fatally hit by the Trinity security van). But I still get creeped out, emotional and uneasy. What, No! The philosophical and emotional arts student is consuming me yet again.
I eventually step back over the invisible border with relief and sit on a pitch bench with a Patrick Kavanagh-esque epiphany. My resolve after my encounter with the Hamilton is quite simple. You simply, and sometimes begrudgingly, cannot help who you are, what you are capable of and where your passions lie, be it overtly sentimental and squeamish Arts student or Yu-Gi-Oh fanatical science student.
The problem is this somehow gets confused. There is a sense of responsibility to fulfill your potential to the best, to do something worthwhile that others don’t have an opportunity to do, to be status, respect, and reputation worthy. I am reminded of this every time I bump into a fellow secondary classmate working the tills in the local supermarket as I stock up for another week of college.
Then comes the question of passion, what alights that fire in your belly, puts your brain into overdrive. How do we balance this with a fat wallet and respected career?
This is what is taunting first year students lately. Do they follow their passions or the employment trends, public status or personal fulfillment, directly beneficial or indirectly influential? Lucky is the person that has a career combining both.
My resolve however, is that surely as wise old Daddy Lavin says, “a content mind is a lined pocket.” Passion will make success, not the other way around. At least I hope so. That’s the plan anyway. But hey, ten years from now, I may be writing obituaries for the Leitrim Observer, but I’ll be happy!..Right? (Otherwise, resume Operation Rich Doctor Husband.)
Either way, for all us freshers in distress, it’s crunch time. In the end only we can decide what is right for ourselves. The weeks will go by, decisions will be made, some stressful, some relieving, some drastic, some affirming but it will all pass and in twenty years from now these decisions will be minor blips in the bigger picture of life.
And if after all my attempts of philosophical contemplation still leaves you distressed, console yourself in the fact that this time next year, according to the Mayans, we’ll all be obsolete anyway. Anyone for a premature year-long wake?
Now that’s what us freshers should really be thinking about!
