Chief Editor's Note: Studying, Adulting and So Much More

I just finished my second year as a master’s student. I wrote my final report of the semester at the end of May, which leaves me with a little something called a master’s thesis to write next year. If all goes well, next year will be my very final year as a student. That is an interesting thought. It hasn’t fully hit me yet, but I know it will happen at some point, especially since so many of my closest and dearest friends are either graduating or have just finished writing their theses. There’s a bittersweetness to it all. I’m incredibly happy for them and proud of them for accomplishing something so huge and meaningful, but I’m also sad to see them go. Life at the university won’t be quite the same anymore. And I know it’ll feel even weirder once graduation rolls around for me in a year or so.

But all the events of this spring have really made me think about my life and what I’ve done with it thus far. And I realised that I really want to take a break. I’ve been in school every year from August or September to May or June since I was 5 years old. It’ll soon be 20 years since I started pre-school and I’ve never taken as much as a semester fully off, so I’m really looking forward to not studying for a moment. I would love to have some time without my schedule being determined by the academic year, lectures and assignments. I really want to just do my own thing for a while. My schedule and in many ways my identity has been so tightly woven together with being a student that I kind of want to see what else I can do. And I’m looking forward to finding out.

At the same time, however, I’m interested in doing a PhD sometime after my master’s degree gets wrapped up. When I started my studies, I hadn’t really thought about what I wanted to do with my life, but over the course of my studies I’ve found relatively steady work as a freelance translator and a passion for academic writing. Especially while I was writing my BA thesis, I truly fell in love with the opportunities of doing research on gender and sexuality in literature and how minorities and their experiences are represented. I found a focus for my studies, which gave me a lot more confidence moving forward. There are still some challenging days and difficult moments, of course, but I get a lot of inspiration from my peers and my teachers and a lot of support from my friends and family.

But because I feel like I need a break, my PhD is probably going to stay on the backburner for a year after I graduate. Or longer, depending on a multitude of circumstances. It’s something to look forward to while I work and travel or rot in bed or whatever I end up doing in-between. One thing I know for sure is that even though I know I’ll be coming back for a PhD is that I’ll spend the time between my MA and my PhD letting go of my student identity. I know a lot of people struggle with that on some level, which is honestly understandable, but I’m personally so ready to be someone else. I already feel ready to retire from student organisation activities and most, if not all student events to be completely honest, but I know I will not be hanging around student events once I’ve graduated. I need to get some distance between who I have been and who I will be, if that makes sense. It would be far more difficult to let go of my student identity if I kept hanging out at student events all the time, and since a lot of my friends will either graduate around the same time or have already graduated by then, we’ll be hanging out elsewhere anyway. Although that does unfortunately bring up something completely different: scheduling hangouts.

Since I work as a freelance translator, I don’t have an office or regular work hours. Instead, I kind of have to schedule my work around everything else in my life. Most people do not have that kind of flexibility in their working lives, however, so they have to schedule their lives around their shifts. This tends to create a bit of a hassle sometimes, when some people don’t work and are free whenever, some have 9 to 5 office hours, others work in shifts when they’re told to and I kind of work around events and hangouts and all that. But we’ll get used to it, that’s just adult life. For my loved ones, I’m more than willing to budget my time and figure out when we can meet up and I’ll extend them grace and patience as we navigate adulthood together.

But before we get there, we’ll enjoy our time as students to the best of our abilities. Students in Finland are going through some tough times all things considered, with cuts to our student benefits, the job market being such a mess with unemployment being at a frankly terrifying rate, and in Helsinki specifically, we’re losing the student facilities we’ve called our home for a long time. The future feels all kinds of uncertain for us. Because of this, I wanted to dedicate this issue of BTSB to our dear fellow students and to student life in general. With all of the changes going on in our lives, we wanted to ask our students how they’re doing, so we conducted a wellbeing survey and I wrote a brief report on what we found out in that survey. For a different perspective, Valo interviewed three fresh high school graduates what they plan to study in the future. But if you would rather think about anything else than studying right now, Alex has got you covered with a wonderful poem.

And with that, BTSB has wrapped up the semester! We will be back for our summer issue, but until then we will be on a bit of a summer break. It’s a weird time to be alive and there’s a lot of stuff going on, but we’ve made it this far. Congratulations to all new graduates, all current students for making it through this semester and all new students getting ready for their studies. Have a lovely summer, we’ll see you soon!