Complaining about mandatory attendance, then missing it.
COMPLAINING ABOUT MANDATORY ATTENDANCE, THEN MISSING IT.
Follow for more insights into the unique journey of university life and beyond.
Remember those early morning lectures, the ones where the professor’s drone almost perfectly synchronized with your lingering desire for another hour of sleep? And attendance was, of course, mandatory. We’d groan, strategize escape routes, and meticulously plan our absences around the minimum requirement. The idea of being forced to be somewhere felt so antithetical to the newfound freedom of university life. Yet, here we are, years later, perhaps finding ourselves reminiscing about those very moments.
It wasn't just the attendance, was it? It was a whole ecosystem of peculiar traditions, some officially sanctioned, others whispered through generations. From the bewildering chaos of certain "primal" releases during exam week to the tantalizing mystery of various unadvertised societies, we often rolled our eyes, perhaps participated grudgingly, or sometimes, out of sheer curiosity. We complained about the quirky rituals, the seemingly pointless gatherings, the long-held customs that felt more like an obligation than an experience.
But then, time passes. The constant hum of campus life fades into memory. You find yourself in boardrooms, or labs, or art studios, and a strange nostalgia creeps in. You realize that those seemingly annoying traditions, even the mandatory ones, were the threads that wove the fabric of your experience. They were the shared struggles, the inside jokes, the collective exasperation that forged an unbreakable bond. The forced attendance meant you saw faces, heard discussions, even when your mind was elsewhere, subtly absorbing the intellectual energy. Those bizarre traditions, once dismissed, now represent the inimitable character of a place that shaped you. We complained, oh we complained so much. And now? We miss the very things we couldn't wait to escape.