Graduation blues

I just read a post by `fallenriver` over on Midnight Pub which left me, as the late, great Terry Pratchett might have said, 'mugged in memory lane'. This post is about the ennui and uncertainty associated with an upcoming graduation. I was suddenly transported back 40+ years to my own undergraduate days, and experienced feelings that I had long forgotten.

fallenriver's post

This passage, I think, sums up the situation pretty well:

I got punched in the face with the finality of this year. [...] I'll miss this life. the dream of living with my friends, the perpetual sleepover, is almost over.

This is how I felt, when contemplating the uncertainty of life after university. I'd loved being an undergraduate. In fact, I felt that my life hadn't really begun until I started my studies. I grew up in a small town where I didn't fit in, where I knew nobody remotely like me. I loathed school, and had no interest in sports. That made me a weird, rather lonely child.

At university, though, most people were like me. OK, there were a few students who liked sports, but what we all mostly liked was drinking, socializing, and -- although nobody would have admitted it -- learning new stuff. Best of all, I was surrounded by young women -- enough of them that even such an ungainly, unappealing specimen as I stood a chance.

I wasn't always happy as an undergraduate but, when I was, I was ecstatic. When I was sad, I was crushingly sad. Everything I experienced, I was experiencing for the first time. My emotions, positive or negative, were more intense than they'd ever been before. Or would be again, for a long time.

Contemplating the end of all this was disheartening. I had no idea what I wanted to do after graduation; all the alternatives looked equally grim. The idea of a regular working life terrified me, but poverty terrified me even more. Worst of all, I wondered what I would do for female companionship, when I was competing with more presentable, wealthier men -- men with the social skills I lacked.

Looking back, it seems as if I've been trying to recapture my undergraduate experience my whole life. My first post-graduation job was in hospital computing in London, an environment not dissimilar to a university campus. I lived in hostel-like accommodation with hundreds of other young people -- most of them women.

We had the same parties and drinking binges, the same gossip and back-biting, the same relentless studying. It wasn't enough though: I eventually returned to university for a PhD and almost, but not quite, took up medicine as a career.

When I ran out of opportunities to be a student, I found myself working in universities as a lecturer, first in medicine, then in computer science. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I finally shook off the hold that university had over me, and got a regular, muggle job -- one where not everybody I worked with had a doctorate, or wanted to sit around, drinking cheap wine and discussing philosophy until 4am every day.

All this to say: if it frightens you to stare down the barrel of imminent graduation, know that you can continue a university-like lifestyle indefinitely. But is it healthy? Eventually, we all have to grow up. The real world isn't so bad, when you get used to it.

Published 2026-03-17, updated 2026-03-17

Graduation blues

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