THE Lower Ormeau Road was a little busier than usual for a Tuesday evening this week. Queues outside the pubs and buzzing fast food restaurants can mean only one thing – the students are back.
Looking at the young faces all wearing their club and county colours made me feel very old. It’s great that things have changed a lot in 20 years – we would have been taking a big risk to wear a jersey to go ‘out out’ in the late 90s.
Ah, the first days of university. I can still smell the freedom, the fear, the anticipation, the unknown.
All my school friends went to Belfast and were between Queen's and Jordanstown. I took myself off to University College Galway (now NUIG), because the course I wanted to study was available only there and in Dublin. Dublin life didn’t appeal to me at all.
It wasn’t lost on me that we were all in the enviable position of third level education being the inevitable next step for most of us. Not everyone had this opportunity then or now. University is not the path for everyone, but I knew that it was for me.
Filling out the UCAS and CAO forms was a chore. I heard about CAO forms on the radio, and ordered my own. UCAS forms for UK universities, CAO forms for the Republic. I remember disagreeing with my teachers about having to fill out a UCAS form in the first place, as I knew that I wanted to go to university in the south.
Writing the personal statement that accompanied those forms was particularly challenging.
I suppose I regarded going to university as an opportunity to stand on my own two feet – as much as is possible for an 18-year-old. To that end, I didn’t see the point of being based somewhere an hour away from home.
Instead, I opted for an experience which entailed an eight-hour journey in order to experience home comforts and TLC. I know that I appreciated going home a lot more because of this decision.
I went to Galway for the first time to find accommodation. I had never been to Galway and had decided that it was the city for me. Mad!
Fair play to my parents, who trusted that I knew what I wanted to do; they supported me whole-heartedly. I got my place in Corrib Village, the student accommodation in UCG and the next journey I made west was the ‘big move’.
When I think about it, I was crazy to up sticks and move so far away, on my own. I didn’t think about it that way. I hoped to meet new people, and I certainly did that. I know people from every corner of the country now thanks to my decision to go to Galway.
I moved in with girls from Clare, Cavan and Mayo and across the corridor lived Casey from Co Galway who, all these years later, is still a dear friend.
I made it home about once a month, and I made that visit count. As is still customary, I imagine, I would fill my bags with food and in turn, fill the freezer. This student made sure to have a well-stocked fridge at all times.
We were strict enough about the cooking and tried to make a pot of something for other each night – pasta was a firm favourite.
I still have no idea how I negotiated my way through the forms and paperwork that went along with getting accepted on a university course. I suppose none of us do. All I can remember is that the sterling-punt conversion rate worked in my favour for the first two years.
Managing money was very new to me. I could eat out all the time if I wanted to. I could go out every night of the week if I wanted to. I never did that because my timetable was full on, with too many 9am starts – but I never missed a Thursday night out in the Warwick in Salthill. I had so many decisions to make, for myself for the first time, and I was about to learn a lot about myself too. It was daunting, yet liberating.
As I watched the students on Tuesday night, I was excited for them but felt sorry for them too. Third-level education in 2018 is expensive. We had it so good and probably didn’t appreciate how good we had it.
