The first weeks of student life are a vortex. The goal has been reached, or neared. The dream-fulfilment, discovery of new domains and simultaneous, tooth-grindingly dull donkey work generate a vortex of energy, excitement, fear and tedium. It introduces what may well be, and certainly should be, the time of your life, this time for real.

Those returning to campus will have a more nuanced perspective. For a start, as we can see from recent reports by the Higher Education Authority and the Economic and Social Research Institute, since this time last year, there will have been fallers at the first fence. One in six, in fact.
The veterans will also know that everything has not panned out as they had imagined. While some courses are brilliant, not all are. The same is, regrettably, true of third-level teaching. The best is engaging, inspirational, illuminating and invigorating. The worst is boring, alienating and ultimately dispiriting.
And the life that goes with it? Well, for most young Irish people their time in higher and further education is the key transition period between youth and adulthood. That’s a change. A century ago people hit that stage five years earlier: most people left school in their early teens. By contrast, nowadays all but 10% finish second-level and of this 90%, some 70% go to college.
Being a student is a time of finding one’s role in the world; of moving outwards from family and becoming part of new networks and communities; and, crucially, it is about establishing an independent identity, both personal and professional.
So, it’s a time of experimentation and exploration as well as study. That sounds like fun and to a large degree it is but, as Headstrong’s My World study showed very clearly, there can also be lots of stress and mess. There will be mistakes, stupidity, ambiguity and drunkenness.
There are two things to say here. The first is that you generally have choices. Yes, it can be hard sometimes not to go with the flow, if everybody is getting pissed before they go out and swigging shots later on. But you can opt out if you choose to. Likewise with sex: always carry a condom and have no fear of saying no. And if someone says no to you, that demands absolute respect.
The second is that you should never hesitate to talk to someone if things are getting on top of you. Colleges have counsellors, tutors, peer supports and mentors. Use them. Also, use web-based services where necessary.
That point made, here’s another: even though many students don’t actually see it, all student life takes place in a series of inter-connected contexts.
One of these is the economy. This year, for the first time in seven years, students return to campus with a sense that the tide may have turned and the worst passed. It looks as though, in addition to providing a framework for working out who you want to be, that degree or diploma might actually have real currency. Good.
That said, very many employers will tell you that not all college courses deliver a great preparation for work. They say it takes six months before a new recruit really makes any contribution at all. It’s not always true, but it’s true of too many courses and that’s a worry.
Also, there appears to be a mismatch between what the education and training system produces and what the economy needs. We no longer produce enough people with what are called intermediate skills and we have to, as they say, import. Likewise, we produce too many in other areas – and, as a result, people feel they need to leave Ireland to find what they’re looking for. That unwanted skill just might be yours.
Another key context is Irish society. Students, more than almost all other groups, have a right – indeed a duty – to ask awkward questions, to challenge the comforts of majorities, to demand consistency and equality and fairness, not just for themselves (as many students do) but for all.
That might also imply a greater commitment to sticking with Ireland, whose taxpayers provide so much of the money that higher education consumes. This funding isn’t provided on the basis that you’re worth it. It’s part of a complex social contract between the generations. Break that contract, as wholesale emigration does, and you open the door to American-level university fees. I mean, why should Irish taxpayers fund a doctor’s degree if that doctor then heads off to another country to practice, leaving us to pillage the resources of poorer countries to
our east?
That wider world is a different context again. Globally, this is a fantastic moment – of extraordinary technological advances, of growth in knowledge and of fresh opportunities – but it is also a time of convulsive wars, of disease, of prejudice and intolerance; and one where the threat of global warming becomes increasingly imminent.
Students in college in 2014 may well live till 2100. By then most jobs will have changed. Robots will be everywhere – hopefully working on our behalf. Yes, cancer will have largely been conquered as will very many other diseases – but new ones are likely to have appeared. Today’s students will potentially be half-cyborg by the time they die!
Between now and then, volcanoes in Iceland and elsewhere will have spewed billions of tons of ash across the earth. If fate is malign enough, the Yellowstone caldera will have blown enough stuff into the atmosphere to induce year round winter for three or four years …
And, of course, climate change will have re-wrought the Earth. Seas will rise, rains will fail and many places will no longer be habitable. Huge dislocations of population will result, on a scale that will put what’s happening in present-day Syria or Eritrea in the halfpenny place.
We all have a role to play. For students, right now, it’s to wring as much as possible that’s positive out of the best five years of their lives; and then, in due course, to make a real contribution to the community and the place that gave them wings – and to the wider world too, if we are privileged enough to be able to. Enjoy!!