By LIU Xiang, Jack (Jockey Club Academy Hall)

www.nipic.com

At university, every day seems to be so slow. But in the blink of an eye, I reached senior year. In a few months’ time, I will leave university and start my new life. There are a lot of things I just cannot leave behind.

Student Status

Being a student means discounts for movie tickets. It means half price MTR rides. It also means less worry and more willingness to take risks. We may have doubts when trying new ideas. But if it is just a school project, we say, “whatever, it is just one course”. But when we try new ideas at work, we probably think, “I should just do it the old way or I might get fired, if the boss doesn’t like it.”

Social Life

If most of your friends are classmates from your university, your circle may shrink a great deal after you leave university. It takes time and effort to make a friendship work. When we are still students, we see each other regularly in this small environment. We bump into each other on the university walk or sit in the same class. But when we graduate, we spread to so many places. Some people used to be just a phone call away but now they are a phone call and two hours of train ride away.

Intellectual Life

To do a course project, we need to read texts of various kinds or do interviews with different people. It might be boring but it is also eye-opening. I am glad to have known about things that I would otherwise never have had the chance or interest to be exposed to. I had a taste of working life through my previous internships. In a normal working day, when you have worked for eight hours already, it is hard to spend the rest of the day doing things other than relaxing.

I talked to a professor about my fear of going away from intellectual life and she told me, “don’t worry, it is never too late to start reading!” She was right. Without the library, we can still read. Without the university, we can still be creative and meet new people. We can still do the things we love, but probably in a different way. Life changes, we should work with it.