No age limits
In the adult Sesame Street parody Avenue Q, the young adult protagonists find themselves wistfully singing about leaving their jobs and going back to college. The mournful final line has always stuck with me: “I’d walk through the quad and think, Oh my God. These kids are so much younger than me.”
I can’t lie and say that part of my reason for doing a PhD wasn’t to experience being at a university again. Like many postgrads I had a gap between my studies – longer in fact then I had intended, and I missed the experience of being in a student environment. Universities are great places to meet people from all different walks of life that you would rarely get to interact with in other areas.
But those words from Avenue Q still stuck with me as readied myself to move to a campus. I feared ending up as the strange old man living on campus surrounded by children. I was afraid to join societies in case I ended up being almost a decade older then the rest of the members. I feared being the guy desperately trying to cling onto his youth and further put off entering the adult world.
I now realise that this was an unfounded fear. It should have always been. When I was an undergrad, I knew plenty of people around my age both in my course and in the societies I joined. Universities have always catered to people of all ages and experiences, not just eighteen-year-olds, fresh out of sixth form. So please, if this is something that is putting you off, don’t worry that you are too old to be a part of the student community. In my first year alone, I met people ranging from their early twenties to their sixties who have all been able to find community among the student body.
Sure, it may not be the same community I had when I was eighteen – but frankly that’s great. I didn’t much like that community when I was eighteen! Joining in with student activities as a PhD student was never about regaining some lost youth. Instead, it was about getting to share in the company of the vast diversity of people that makes up a university. And that doesn’t have an age limit.