Farewell to the studies that kept me busy, alive, and my best self for the past four years

SO THAT’S it then. Over. Just like that. Four of the more engaging, rewarding and challenging years of my adult life. Done.

I got my final year undergrad exam results from Trinity last week and after that initial sense of relief, and even elation, another feeling nipped into position straight after.

That was one of loss. The realisation that the thing that kept me busy, alive, and my best self wouldn’t be there again next term.

All that good stress is gone. The necessity to be up and out. To be constantly reading and studying, prepping for tutorials, writing essays, preparing projects, racing off assignments.

That need to be learning every day just to stand still and not fall behind. To feed that inner competitor that had you in contest with yourself rather than anyone else.

It was never easy, but I wouldn’t have wanted it to be. If I had just needed to pass the time I’d have bought golf clubs.

I learned early on that they take their history very seriously in Trinity. They have fairly exacting standards and their way of doing things.

I had come from a life – over 40 years is a good chunk of anybody’s – where the rules were different.

But if I thought the university of life had given me much of a start over raw school-leavers I was very mistaken.

Baby-faced and unsure perhaps, but they brought with them a regimen for consuming and processing information that had me in something like awe. Shock and awe, actually.

I noticed how in the packed lecture halls of junior fresher year they simply inhaled the lecturers’ wisdoms while looking fashionably detached and only vaguely interested.

This learning business seemed like second nature to them. It helped that they were very bright young people with scary CAO scores.

These 18-year-olds seemed fluent in the language of learning. I floundered. A tourist in a foreign land without a guidebook.

Never a more apt example of the past being a different country. I did my Leaving Cert in a different millennium and I felt it.

It soon dawned that there were more things I needed to forget than bring with me.

What had seemed strengths in my old world were often weaknesses now. Intuition and instinct seemed like poor substitutes for method and discipline.

A few weeks into my first term a tutor returned a small assignment to me. I had put a decent bit of work into it and was looking forward to his remarks.

He didn’t mean it to sting, but it did anyway.

He ringed certain words, underlined some passages and simply said that this wasn’t how they wrote in Trinity.

It was a jolt. A valuable one. Made me realise I was starting from my own personal year zero.

The irony was that I had many Trinity graduates through my hands in the Irish Independent over the years and more than once I would have told a new recruit to stop writing like they were still in college.

But I adapted and adjusted. Trinity has been teaching this stuff since 1592. It wasn’t going to change for me.

After a few wobbles I settled in. By the end of the first term I had my roadmap. In no time this whole world, so arcane and inhospitable at first, became mine. I thrived in it.

I loved being in the place, felt privileged to stroll across its historic campus on my way to seminars or the Berkeley.

Fellow students, separated by a long generation, became friends. Wonderfully resilient too, despite the lazy rumours.

I envy any mature out there about to start. The best years of your life are right ahead of you.

Be your best.