I'm Now An Ex Student

I just found out my degree classification and I feel I probably shouldn't put this post off anymore.

As of the 13th of June I finished my time at the University of Sheffield. My student card officially expired on the 26th and now I'm what some people might call "an adult"1, but it took today for it to finally sink in that I'm no longer a student.

Like most people, I've been in some form of education for the past 17/18 years and seeing my degree classification2 has finally put an end to a significant proportion of my life.

People always talk about leaving for university as a big thing and a major point in their life. At the time I wasn't entirely sure why - yes, I was leaving home and I'd have to put up with actually doing the washing, cooking and all the other things that you take for granted, but it just felt like a move to me. Nothing really changed in my head. But now, I can no longer tick a box that's been part of my identity for almost my whole life.

Being a student meant very little to me. In most cases, it was a way of getting cheap bus fares and being surrounded by a great deal of things that needed to be done to satisfy somebody3. Most of what I was doing wasn't "real"4.

But now, I'm no longer in a world of assignments and imaginary settings. I'll be building actual things for actual people instead of having to make things for myself. There's no safety net of "Meh, doesn't matter if I do it quick and dirty since this doesn't mean anything in the long run". That's sort of scary.

Of course, it's also damn exciting. I'm really looking forward to spending my time working on things I love to work on. Over the past 3 weeks I've been really enjoying rewriting the software packages I maintain since I don't feel bad spending time on them and getting them right.

Not being a student anymore is scary. But it's also exciting. And I hope good things come of it.

  1. I, of course, inherently disagree with them. ↩︎

  2. If you want to be technical, these are pre-approved classifications that need to be sorted by the faculty or some other bureaucratic nonsense. But for all intents and purposes, I will have what's on that sheet. ↩︎

  3. You could argue that my entire life will be me doing something to satisfy someone, but that would be cynical. ↩︎

  4. I took Computer Science and Mathematics. So little of what I learned in Mathematics happened in the real world. To this day, I have no idea what purpose this module has. ↩︎