The University Student’s Dilemma
The story is about the mental struggle of University students in modern day Australia. We have worked hard for 13 years of pre-tertiary education and achieved a substantial ATAR score to attend University. We go to university because we want to study our passions to evolve them into a profession to make a living. However, with this we find ourselves in limbo between coming out of school as adults in the world, but being too young to make a living. Some of us don’t know what we want to do, but we aim to learn so we can get a job of our choosing. We don’t know what lies ahead, yet we work hard so we can achieve…who knows? This unknown path is fraught with obstacles we must overcome, to which we worry and fret about our futures because of them. I’m talking about the tight job market in the ‘best of the best of the best get the job’ Capitalist system. The economy is facing an inevitable change in structure, or it will fall. We feel this effects with the rise in petrol price, inflated cost of living and general prices of essentials. We live at home, we live in boarding houses, and we live on the couches. We’re not adults yet, but we’re not kids. We work through this while maintaining the responsibilities of an adult (such as studying, voting, independency and autonomy from our parents, without getting paid.) We have flown the coop and now we drift the treacherous skies looking for our new home, but we don’t know where to go, what it will look like or even, if we’ll get there. There is no map or manual to guide us through this mystery. Never has it been so hard for University students to become successful in their careers, as University degrees has become the standard trait of any competitor in the job market. We work for free; we do internships and travel thousands of kilometers overseas for international exchange in hopes of differentiating ourselves from other students. By the time we finish, we are up to tens of thousands of dollars in debt a
nd still are competing to make a living. How
do we change this? Follow your passion and chase the dream. Find what makes you happy, not what makes you money and go for it! Stand up in the fog that is our immediate lives and walk through, stepping on top of the obstacles, crushing them in your path. Throw the map and brave the cold as we step out into the unknown. This may be dangerous, but for the path we take, we have chosen the one that is the most enjoyable and what will make us happy in the long term. Our lives were not given to us so we could work one-hundred-plus hours a week and have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank which we barley touch, because we’re working all the time. It’s
like a bird feathering its nest but never resting in it. I believe in the metaphor of the bird, because what we are now is drifting in flight. We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what we’ll find, but we know what feels good and what makes us happy. So ‘fly left’ and hope for the best
.