By Lindsay Shimizu, Second Year, English
There is something wrong with you. You don't have the confidence that your essay will earn you a first. You made a mistake during a seminar that makes you look ridiculously unprepared and scattered. You got lost in the Arts Complex yet again. Now, you sit in your lecture and the girl next to you has been intently listening to the lecturer drone on and on about Tristram Shandy. You should be interested, this is the degree you chose after all, but you don't seem to have the motivation. As you try to pay attention, you cannot help but get overwhelmed every time you glance at the girl next to you with perfect Notion outlines that actually look as if they are effectively translating the technical jargon of the lecturer into something that may help her study later. When the lecture is over, she and her friend get up to leave. She places her laptop, covered in perfectly curated stickers, into a chic shoulder bag leaving you to cram your slightly oversized laptop into your backpack from three years ago. You've attended the same lecture, you are in the same modules, and maybe you don't know her, but you know she is perfect. And you are not.
You should study and try hard to achieve academic success. You want to apply yourself to your course, and you have been doing the readings each week. But you also chastise yourself when you stay home to study when you could be going out with friends. You’ve been told you need to prioritise your mental health, but your attendance at your seminars is vital to staying on top of your coursework. You feel off balance but choosing to go to university was your choice. You knew it would be difficult, and now that you are struggling, it is easier for you to believe that you are the problem instead of believing that uni life is unfair or difficult.
This would all be easier, you think, if you were the girl from your lecture. She probably has better time management than you, she isn’t consumed by looming deadlines, and she’s still finding time to go out with her friends. Since coming to university, you realise just how anonymous your course is. With the anonymity of university, it’s not hard to mystify and exalt her. You think you remember her name, but that’s about it. You don’t know if she’s done the weekly reading. You don’t know what her marks are, and yet she adopts a warm glow of perfection. You can’t help but assume that her essays keep receiving high marks and that she’s figured out the secret to balancing academic work and a social life. But inside you is the shadowy truth: the girl from your lecture is not the perfect student. She is the projection of your own insecurity and inadequacy.
Think hard as to why you feel the need to compare yourself to this perfect student. For your entire academic career, you have been constantly reminded of how important scholastic success is. Since being at university, you have been seeking approval to confirm that you truly deserve your place in your seminar. You want to belong, to know that you fit in, that you aren’t too stupid to receive higher education.
Here is the thing. If you are comparing yourself to anyone at university, if you feel inadequate, and if you feel like an imposter, you are normal. University life asks you to be a student first and a human second. The perfect student might be able to read all of Pamela, fit in a secondary reading or two, show up to the seminar with annoyingly clever insight, and still manage to make it to a club social in the evening. But at the end of the day, she is a figment. You are mortal. To survive university, as backwards as it may seem, you have to remind yourself that before you are a student, you are just a person. You may be a person who knows how valuable higher education is and wants to work hard, learn, and be successful. But you have to do so knowing that perfection is a fallacy. You will make mistakes. Your coursework will confuse you. You will give into checking your phone one too many times during a lecture. These reminders, as obvious as they may seem, go ignored when we convince ourselves that we might actually one day be like the girl in our lecture. Let’s not kid ourselves. Let us all be imperfect together. The perfect student never struggles, but if that is the case she isn’t learning. So, while you may not be the girl from your lecture, you might just be better. Because you are real. You are trying, and maybe for now, that has to be enough.