Karly

On Friday I told my therapist that I thought I had academic FOMO, which has been quietly creeping up on me for a while and has become considerably worse since my TikTok algorithm discovered that exchange students at the university where I did my undergraduate degree are apparently exactly what I want to see every five videos. I keep getting clips of people arriving there for the first time, walking through buildings I know embarrassingly well, figuring out where everything is, making friends, sitting outside between classes and discovering all the tiny things about campus life that stopped being noteworthy to me years ago because they were simply part of my everyday routine.

There is something profoundly strange about watching somebody else discover a place that exists in my memory with the intimacy of an old house, because I know what is around the corner before they turn the camera, I know which paths lead where and I can almost remember the feeling of being there on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon with somewhere to be in forty minutes and absolutely no idea that one day I would be watching a stranger walk the same route from several years and several versions of myself away. The videos are rarely showing anything particularly remarkable either, which somehow makes them more effective, because it is somebody carrying a coffee across campus, somebody showing the view from a classroom, somebody filming the walk between buildings or announcing that they have just survived their first week, and suddenly I am looking at a life that used to feel completely ordinary to me as though it belongs to some distant country I once lived in.

I assumed the feeling was academic FOMO because that seemed like the obvious explanation, especially coming from someone who still enjoys browsing university websites and course catalogues despite having fallen rather spectacularly out of love with academia itself somewhere along the way. My therapist was less convinced and suggested that what I was describing sounded much more like nostalgia, particularly because even if I were somehow dropped back onto that campus tomorrow, I would not be returning to the thing I actually remember, given that the people would be different, the routines would be different and, inconveniently, so would I, which led us into the very Harry Styles territory of acknowledging that nothing is the same as it was.

She is probably right, although this has left me with a more complicated question than the one I started with, because if I do not particularly want another degree and I have no desire to resurrect deadlines, assessment criteria, group projects or the peculiar academic tradition of writing very simple ideas in prose so dense that you begin to suspect readability is considered a moral failing, then I have to work out what exactly I am longing for whenever one of these videos appears. I still love learning and probably enjoy it more now that nobody is grading me for it, so whatever I am missing seems to live somewhere around academia rather than inside the actual machinery of it.

I think part of it is the structure, because university gave the year a shape that ordinary adult life does not necessarily have. My semesters started in August, which meant August was never simply the tail end of summer or the month when everyone began vaguely talking about autumn while it was still far too warm outside, because August meant life was about to start moving again. Schedules appeared, classes began, people returned, campus filled up and the year suddenly had direction after the looseness of summer, while January offered another smaller reset a few months later and every week in between arrived already divided into places to be, things to do and people you were likely to see along the way.

There was something deeply reassuring about knowing that Monday meant one thing and Wednesday meant another, that you had a class at ten and an hour free at one and that somewhere between the two you would probably run into somebody you knew without either of you having planned it. I have much more control over my own time now and I genuinely value that freedom, although complete control over your schedule has a strange way of making days bleed into one another if you are not careful, because nobody arrives with a timetable at the beginning of August to inform you that the next four months now have a beginning, a middle and an end.

I suspect that is why August still creates a tiny sense of expectation in me even when there is nothing specific for me to expect, because my internal calendar spent years learning that this was when things began. There is a particular mood to the middle of August that I apparently still recognise before I have consciously worked out what it is, and seeing exchange students arrive at my old university at exactly the time when I would once have been preparing to go back has probably activated some ancient part of my brain that would quite like to know where my timetable is.

There is also, and I cannot overstate the importance of this, back-to-school shopping, which may be the clearest evidence that my supposed academic FOMO is only partially interested in academia. I miss having a legitimate reason to buy new notebooks, pens, folders, pencil cases and planners every August while entertaining the annual fantasy that I was about to become a completely different type of student, one whose notes would remain immaculate after week three, whose planner would be updated religiously and whose carefully chosen system of coloured pens would not be abandoned the moment taking notes became even slightly inconvenient.

I loved the ridiculous optimism of it, because a new notebook bought before the semester started had not yet been contaminated by reality and therefore contained every possible version of the next few months. Nobody had assigned an unreasonable amount of reading yet, nobody had announced a group presentation, nothing was overdue and the notebook itself still suggested that this might finally be the semester in which everything would be beautifully organised from beginning to end. I could already own several entirely functional notebooks and still feel that buying another one was necessary because those were ordinary notebooks and this was a new-semester notebook, which was clearly a separate category with its own legal protections.

The older I get, the more I think the appeal of back-to-school shopping had less to do with the objects themselves than with what they represented, because there are not many moments in adult life when you can walk into a shop and purchase physical evidence that a new chapter is about to begin. A planner, a folder and an unnecessary number of pens made the future feel tangible, and perhaps what I miss when August arrives now is that feeling of preparation for something whose shape I could already vaguely see.

The social part of university probably matters even more, particularly now that I have enough distance from it to appreciate how unusual that environment actually was. For several years you exist among people who are roughly at the same stage of life, moving through the same spaces on overlapping schedules, and friendship develops inside that infrastructure almost without anybody noticing that it is happening, because seeing people does not require the level of organisation it often seems to require later.

You finish a class with someone and get coffee, you bump into somebody outside the library and suddenly you are having lunch, you sit beside the same person often enough that eventually you know everything about their romantic life and you make plans for the evening while you are still standing around waiting for somebody else to finish talking. Even the people who never became actual friends belonged to the landscape of your life in a way that feels strangely intimate in retrospect, because you knew who always sat near the front, who arrived five minutes late, who you would see in the same place every Thursday and who would inevitably be standing outside smoking whenever you came out of a particular building.

I think I miss that density of people and possibility more than I realised, because university allowed social life to happen incidentally, whereas adulthood can make friendship feel alarmingly administrative. Seeing someone you love can require several messages, three potential dates and a minor negotiation over everybody’s respective commitments, while university friendship could happen because you both had forty minutes free and were already standing next to each other.

There is probably some nostalgia for myself woven through all of this too, which is perhaps the most uncomfortable part to admit because places become tangled up with identity so thoroughly that it becomes difficult to work out whether you miss the place, the period of your life or the person you were while you were there. I do not think I want to be that age again and I certainly do not want every element of my undergraduate years restored exactly as it was, although I look back at that version of myself with considerably more tenderness than I gave her while I was actually being her, and watching somebody else walk around my old campus can occasionally feel like catching a glimpse of her somewhere just outside the frame.

She had classes to go to, people she would see without planning it, things to complain about and a whole semester stretching in front of her that felt enormous while she was living through it, and of course she had absolutely no idea that some of the moments she considered too ordinary to remember would eventually become the ones capable of making her nostalgic. Memory is annoyingly selective in that way, because it preserves the coffee between classes, the walk across campus, the new stationery and the feeling of seeing your friends after summer while becoming surprisingly vague about the stress, the exhaustion and the afternoons when you would have happily traded the entire university experience for the opportunity to stay in bed.

The exchange student TikToks are probably particularly dangerous because they are being made by people who are still in the stage where everything is new enough to deserve documenting, which means I am seeing my old university through the eyes of someone experiencing all the anticipation without any of the accumulated fatigue. They are filming the first weeks, the new friends, the unfamiliar buildings and the small rituals that will eventually become routine, and I am watching from the other side of the experience knowing exactly how quickly something extraordinary becomes ordinary and how much you can end up missing the ordinary once it is gone.

I do not think there is necessarily a conclusion to any of this yet, and perhaps that is what I am trying to become more comfortable with, because nostalgia does not always need to be interpreted as an instruction to recreate whatever you are missing. I can miss university without wanting to enrol in another degree, I can miss the structure without surrendering the freedom I have now and I can miss a social world built around accidental encounters without pretending that returning to the same campus years later would somehow resurrect it.

What I can do is pay attention to the details that keep coming back and wonder whether there are new versions of them that belong in my life now, whether that means creating more structure around my weeks, finding places where community happens a little more naturally, learning things for the pleasure of learning them or simply accepting that August may always feel like the beginning of a semester somewhere inside my head. I am also perfectly happy to preserve the back-to-school shopping portion of the experience indefinitely, because I see no reason adulthood should deprive me of a new notebook simply because nobody is going to give me a syllabus to go with it.