Student XP
Orientation ends on a Friday and the rest of your life starts on the Monday. Almost nobody tells you what happens in between, so we will.
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Orientation ends on a Friday and the rest of your life starts on the Monday. Almost nobody tells you what happens in between, so we will.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that belongs to the first month of student life, and it has almost nothing to do with study. It is the tiredness of making forty small decisions a day that used to be made for you, or made once, years ago, by somebody else. Which bus. Which door. Which queue. Where the cheap groceries are and where the expensive ones pretend to be cheap. How the washing machine in your building works and whether the person who left their clothes in it is coming back. None of this appears on a timetable. All of it takes energy. If you have moved for study, you are doing this while also missing a house, a kitchen, a language of small talk, and people who knew you before you were the new one.
Orientation is designed to be welcoming, and it usually is, but it is also compressed. You are handed a great deal of information in a few days, most of it about systems you have not yet needed to use. Then it stops. The gap that follows, between the end of the welcoming and the beginning of actually knowing anything, is where most of the first month happens. It is not a sign that you missed something. It is the structure of the thing. Everyone walks through that gap, including the confident ones, including the ones already laughing in groups by the second week.
Welcome week teaches you the map, not the territory, and the difference shows up around day nine.
Inspections are short, crowded and designed to move quickly. Slow yourself down deliberately.
The number that matters is not your hourly rate. It is the hours the job actually eats.