Guide To Being A Mature Student
ARE you one of the thousands of Irish adults who has realised that holding down a mediocre job in a post-pandemic world doesn’t have the same security it once held and are now actively seeking to up-skill and re-educate yourself out of fear of being yet another discarded citizen stuck on the fringes of a spiraling rich/poor divide?
Great! WWN has put together this handy go-to guide for all budding mature students returning to college this year:
Before you begin, please do not be intimidated by the fact you are an older student attending a college full of young, energised teenagers. By the time they get their heads out of their phones you will already be halfway through your first year. Plus, they will blatantly ignore you anyway once they find out how old you are.
They will either think you’re a bit slow or a nark planted there to lift the lid on the college drug scene. Either scenario leads to the same treatment.
While attending lectures, always make sure to keep all your obvious questions until the very end of the class to hold everyone else up from leaving the room/Zoom. Ignore all the deep sighs from your younger college peers while the lecturer stares vacantly at your ridiculously stupid question.
Relish in the fact that you’re the only one listening to the obvious answer that you should have already known but didn’t due to working at the same monotonous job for the past 20 years that has left your brain redundant.
Never speak to younger members of the opposite sex unless spoken too. Even the bare mention of a little johnny joke can have you put on the sex offenders register these days so just be mindful that what was funny in the 1980s, is now a fully blown crime carrying with it severe consequences.
Don’t tell anyone your real age as people under the age of 25 is unable to comprehend why an ‘old person is back in college’. Such thoughts in young people can lead them to understand that life isn’t as predictable and rosy as those people in the Tik Tok videos.
Never reveal the reasons why your partner left you and why your own kids don’t talk to you anymore and this is your last chance at making something of yourself – these kids need hope and optimism, not the exact opposite, eg. your life.
If forced to attend a ‘night out’, always just stick around for the one before sneaking off right before the shots stage. If you stay post-shots, you’re destined to end up creeping on someone half your age before ending up crying on the steps outside a nightclub, stuffing bits of kebab into your mouth that you drunkenly dropped on the wet road.
Finally, just have fun with it; this will be the best 6 months of your life before you finally drop out due to stress from the academic workload and end up taking a range of benzos for the remainder of your life. And never forget, at least you tried.