I’d like to talk to you today about something that most students must face during their university careers. It’s a stage of life that is tough, frightening, and occasionally completely humiliating. I don’t come here to lecture or to preach, but I’ve come to warn you about the hardest part of school: graduation.
When you first escape from the confines of university, you go through all the stages of loss: sadness, anger, arousal, heavy drinking, poor tattoo choices, and acceptance. At first, you may feel confident that your petty degree will garner you a place in society, but by the time that mid-August rolls around and you’ve just tequila-shotted away your last remaining bit of OSAP, suddenly it hits you: Oh God, is this what the real world is like?
In one abrupt swoop, you’re in the real world. There are no more mornings where you can choose to skip your 10 a.m. Plants and You BOT200 course in order to sleep off your Jägerbomb-induced hangover. No more vaguely cheesy cafeteria food. No more days spent napping at the back of a 300 person class, sure that your mildly attractive yet completely overworked TA would never notice the puddle of drool that is threatening to encroach on your perky neighbour’s MacBook. You are in the real world now, and you are its bitch. Hate your job? Too bad, the job market is hell, and God forbid you want to work in journalism. Better take that job working as a secretary at your uncle’s law firm, lest you have to return back to the service industry and weep bitter tears deep into your expensive degree. Sure, there are always the few who leave university to not only get their dream job, but also somehow find time to save the world, make six figures, and have scads of hot, knee-burning sex with other money-making, world-saving fools. You will come to realize that these people are idiots, but only because you are not one of them, and you’d probably eat your own nipples for the chance to quit bartending and move to a sassy downtown condo where you can alternate between buffing your various awards and dating that brunette in English class you were too nervous to talk to.
There are some things that are nice about graduating and being without a real job. You can drink in the afternoon generally without consequence; you can read for fun again; the word “midterms” no longer make you break out into a cold sweat; you can carry your degree around in your wallet and use it to pick up at clubs. (“Oh my god, you have a BA in classics? God, that’s sexy.”) Also, you eventually figure things out and understand how to network and find some job you like and some friends whose lives don’t revolve around what library they’re going to go to next, but those first few months can really suck the will to live right out of you.
But the major downside to being out of school is that it isolates you. Suddenly, you’re the only person who has nothing to do on evenings, and everything your friends do and talk about seems to pertain to a world you’re no longer part of. Not to mention that suddenly all your friends in masters or PhD programs suddenly seem like even bigger tools than before, lauding their esoteric areas of study around while you try to work off the eyestrain from your copyediting job. Yes, you may have a job, but they are working towards bigger and better things. They are still in school, but better.
I have to back-track a little: no matter how bad it seems, you’ll survive. You’ll get a job, get laid, eat better, and you’ll never have to look at Robarts again. But there’s always the day where you look out the window, ready to throw yourself against the glass screaming, “Stop the real world! I want to get off!”
