by Katie Biddle

Starting University, you have big plans and dreams of what’s to come. You’re going to meet your best friends in week one, by week two you’ll have a local pub where you know the bartender by name, and by week three you’ll be completely settled in your tiny, overpriced accommodation and will have finished the excruciating reading list before your first official lecture.

But what if you haven’t met the group of people you fit in with yet, or if you haven’t found a pub which plays the right music all night long. What if you haven’t even started reading Dracula for your first class. What if a pandemic shuts the whole country down just as you were starting to settle in your new city? Are we missing out on these crucial years of university culture? 

University culture might mean drinking till you pass out, sexual freedom found through living on your own for the first time, or maybe like most people it’s an opportunity to engage with a new landscape and be independent. Six months to adapt is a short time before you’re locked down and can curate enough banana bread to feed all the mouths in your building, but we had to do it. Perhaps you went home and felt robbed of your rent. Maybe you stayed in the city but got sick of the four walls that suffocated you Every. Single. Day. Is this the university experience we signed up for? I feel like I’m missing out. Missing the insufferable commute, missing sushi between classes, missing the nights out that remind me why I chose London over my small seaside town.

I feel like I’m missing out, but I also feel like I’ve gained from this time. I’m more creative, less anxious and actually have time to finish Dracula (even though I hate it)! Lockdown has taken so much from us, some an immeasurable amount, but for those who it has only taken their freedom to walk outside, maybe, like me, you have gained what you wouldn’t have before. Online university allows you to cook your breakfast and hug your cat whilst you learn how powerfully important the 60s teenager was to sexual liberation. If you’re on furlough, like me, you might have the extra undivided attention you needed for your assignments to get your first First. Maybe you now have common ground with your flatmates who are going through the same thing, so understand why you’ve eaten beans on toast every day for the past week. Lockdown has taken so much from us where we feel like we are missing out, but how nice will it be when we look back at this time to see that we have gained something: gained perspective on the fragility of life, gained better work habits, gained an online friend, gained half a stone. Missing out is an intense emotion that makes us feel like we are being cheated, in some cases we have been, but to find a positive in an overwhelming space of negatives makes you feel like you’re much less than missing out, rather looking forward to a new future.