It is okay to graduate late
Back in school, the path forward was clearly defined and laid out for you. You simply had to jump from one hurdle to another till you reached the finish line. I thought university was going to be the same. I had a plan and I was going to conquer it. I wasn't going to be a carefree person who graduated from university without an end in sight. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I had naively underestimated the higher education experience on several grounds.
I had not accounted for the fact that it was easy to fail a course and get stuck in a loop of retakes, that courses wouldn't be offered consistently every semester, or accommodate everyone who wished to take them. Sometimes it would be impossible to tackle a heavy workload without burning out. And projects, research work, and jobs wouldn't flow smoothly either. Life-changing events like the death of a loved one, financial constraints, mental health issues, and accidents are all factors that can deter us from following a predefined timeline.
When you have spent most of your life and education surrounded by the same people, experiencing everything incrementally together, you are under the illusion that life will follow the same pace even when you are out of school. This idea couldn't be further from the truth. It becomes very apparent quickly that you are on your own. As the shared path forks into wholly different directions, it becomes easy to constantly compare yourself to peers whom you went to school with.
Someone will go on to get a job, some will get married, while a fraction will go on to do other great things. I have reached the point in life where I am grappling with these developments regularly and constantly feeling left behind. "But it is not a competition" is a mantra I have to repeat to myself daily to prevent myself from spiralling about not graduating "on time" so I can also feel like a grownup.
For the longest time, I struggled with low self-esteem as I felt like I wasn't upholding my "usual standards" and my school batchmates were acquiring shiny new achievements with relative ease. These feelings usually occur when we have high expectations of ourselves and a rigid definition of what our life is supposed to look like.
When I realised that the people who went abroad graduated faster because the systemic problems and bureaucracy that exist in Bangladesh are not issues that persist overseas, and the people who went on to achieve major milestones do so because of the differences that exist in our socio-economic backgrounds, connections, wealth, and a lot of luck, I stopped beating myself up over it. It is okay to graduate later, it doesn't mean things will go badly in the future because of it.
It is important to remember that we are each on our own path and we are exactly where we are meant to be. Things will come to each of us in due time. It is not worth attaching our self-worth to the duration of our educational journey because life has different seasons and it isn't always supposed to follow a blueprint. Falling behind is not the end of the world.
Mashiyat Nayeem is a student at NSU.