A lengthy, but worthwhile and perhaps even inspiring intro...

My motivation for this blog draws on my own experiences of being a young anthropology undergraduate student with quite literally no idea as to what I was doing. In first year I found myself blindly navigating the treacherous terrain of university life and a discipline I had only discovered a few months prior. I should perhaps start with the admission that the genesis of my relationship with anthropology is not a story of some intrinsic, passionate calling that lured me out of the scholarly shadows and into the inviting embrace of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown (the OG’s of anthropology one might say). In fact I was utterly clueless about what I wanted to study. Other students may resonate with this given the pressures of our modern capitalist society, but I felt obligated to follow the seemingly pre-determined trajectory leading from school, to university to then employment. In other words, going to university was a given but what I would study was less of a concern. My mum was a little more alarmed by my complacent attitude towards choosing a degree. One day during study leave she said to me ‘When I come home, I want you to have decided what you are going to study’. However, as one does during study leave, I spent the day glued to the television leaving me with 10 minutes to decide before she returned home. Using my far from impressive research skills I googled ‘what university subjects are there’. Happening upon an A-Z list, anthropology stood out against the other ‘A’ competitors of accounting, aeronautical engineering, agriculture and anatomy mainly because it firstly, didn’t sound like one of the dreaded hard sciences (that which my brain isn’t fond of) and secondly, I didn’t know what it was. Two further google searched followed to deduce what on earth anthropology is and whether I could study this mysterious craft at Edinburgh University (the top dog in my eyes). I might add that neither my google search nor the following 3 years at university have equipped me with a comprehensive answer to the question of what on earth anthropology is. I did, however, have an answer for my mum when she returned home that evening. It was quite possibly the worst made, best decision of my life.

The point of this caveat is not to paint myself as a mediocre, unprepared and unfocused undergraduate as this is in fact not the case. I am extremely fortunate to have developed a great passion for my degree and I have learned how to study it, although this didn’t come naturally. It took some time to deeply engage with the subject, the lectures and university life due to various personal issues that tracked back to feeling like an intruder; the mediocre, unprepared and unfocused undergraduate I have just argued against being. It follows that the point of this blog is to show that people navigate vastly different paths on their route towards their course at university. In my opinion the pressure to have a concrete, meaningful answer to the standard tutorial question of ‘what brought you to study this course?’ can be difficult for those of us who perhaps just felt pressure to go to university, to ‘follow their strengths’, to do something different, or to just pick something to study. Not being able to answer that question definitively doesn’t reflect a lack of direction or purpose but is in fact very normal. I want to advocate for a recognition of students as ongoing learners, not just in their degree programmes but in a wider sense. We are bound to make countless mistakes and errors, but the beauty is we still have the time to do so. Instead of racing against the life clock propelled by the forces of capitalism we sometimes need to take a step back and enjoy the process, take time to learn how to learn and avoid placing tremendous amounts of pressure on ourselves. I’ve chosen to hold onto the fact that we’ve all got here one way or another, there has been various obstacles and setbacks we’ve faced in order to get here and there will be many more which we will face throughout university. However, perhaps the most important thing this blog can hope to do is instil its readers with some sense of determination and strength that you have earned and deserve your place, wherever that may be, and from there the rest is up to you. This is perhaps not the practical academic tip you were looking for, but I think its worth recognising the fact that university and the highly competitive job culture we live in breeds self-doubt. Overcoming these feelings by recognising one’s own value is essential to enhancing your academic and professional development, hence why this feels like a good place to start.