By reading this, you might have started university or face the challenge to choose where to go. There might be a lot of questions coming up. One I was asking myself all the time was: how is it, to be a student?
After studying for only half a year now, I think I figured out that being a student takes more than ‘just being a student’. You are someone’s child, sister or brother, best friend or lover. If you have any hobbies, you might also be a musician, an athlete, a team player, a painter or a reader. If you have a side job, you might also be an employee or a co-worker.
Basically you are so many things. So many different roles that you slip into, sometimes within one single day. And being a student is only one of them. Being a student is actually a combination of all of them. And here comes the part where it all gets tricky: balance.
How the heck should you be able to juggle with all those different roles without neglecting or overplaying one? How can you stay in contact with your beloved ones at home while being fully settled abroad? How can you maintain a healthy lifestyle while ordering those yummy pizzas? How can you go out 3 nights in a row while being present at university on an early Monday morning?
I think the funny part of these questions is that they remain unanswered. There can’t be a right or wrong because there is no way that works for us all. Being a student might be compared to a roller-coaster which does not only go up and down, accelerates and slows down, but which pulls and pushes you in any possible direction you can think of. And there we might come to the answer to the previous questions: just enjoy the ride.
Enjoy the hustle, the takeout, the early morning workout, the late night working session, the deep conversation with a person you just met, the stroll through the city, the pre drinking sessions with your friends and the abnormal amount of coffee you will consume.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that you should be doing all those things in order to be a good (or bad) student. But in the future you might face an overwhelming situation that you struggle with and there will hopefully come the moment you’ll pace everything down, look around you and realize the best thing you can do against it, is to enjoy the ride.
Little side story: as I’m not studying for that long now, I still come across new things and people. When my second semester started, I realized that I’m still facing unknown situations every now and then, but handle them differently than before. What I wanna say by that is that you’ll get used to it eventually. The new chapter will become your everyday life and you’ll not even think about the concept of ‘being a student’ anymore.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of changes and always trying out new things, so that was and still is the part of being a student that I like the most. I hope that sharing my thoughts here will make you realize that there are probably thousand others out there who deal with the same situations or ask themselves the same questions than you do. So at least it’s comforting knowing that we are all up shit’s creek!