Why My Daughter’s University Search Made Me Rethink My Own College Memories
The lecture hall smelled like floor polish and old paper. We’d slipped into the back row of a first-year economics class, my daughter Maya and I, during her second university open day in as many weeks. The professor was explaining supply curves with the kind of purposeful energy that only works on a morning when you’ve had two coffees and a clear plan. Maya wrote nothing down. She just watched the other students, most of them sprawled low in their seats, a few taking frantic notes.
“Dad,” she whispered, “do you think it’s actually worth it?”
That’s the question, isn’t it? The one we all ask but rarely say out loud in front of admissions officers. For months, we’d been walking around campuses, eating overpriced sandwiches in student unions, nodding at sales pitches about “employability scores” and “library opening hours.” But Maya was asking something different. She wasn’t asking about the cost of tuition or the graduate statistics. She was asking me, a man who’d spent four unremarkable years in a red-brick university in a town I can barely remember, whether the whole thing mattered.
I didn’t have an answer. So I told her the truth about my own experience—the one we don’t normally put in the brochures.
I went to university because my parents expected it, and because my A-level results made it the natural next step. I studied history, a subject I loved but have never once used in a professional context. I spent the first year being shy, the second year in a bad relationship, the third year writing an essay about someone obscure, and the final year panicking about what came next. I made friends I no longer speak to. I drank a lot of tea. I graduated with a 2:1 and a vague sense that I was supposed to feel changed, but mostly I just felt like the same person with a heavier box of books.
That’s not a story people tell at open days. But as we drove to the next campus, Maya asked me what university actually taught me, if not the facts and figures. And I had to be honest. It taught me how to say nothing in a seminar while still getting a good mark. It taught me how to survive on oven chips. It taught me how to write an essay the night before it was due—arguably the most transferable skill I learned.
But it did not, I realised, teach me how to decide what I wanted to be. And isn’t that the unspoken promise we make to our kids? That university will be the place where they discover themselves? The glossy prospectus in Maya’s hands implied it. The upbeat student ambassador leading our tour implied it. But the truth is messier.
When we got to the second campus, Maya sat on a bench and said she didn’t know if she wanted to go at all. If she deferred, she’d be the only one in her friendship group not applying. She was scared of missing out, but also scared of going and being underwhelmed, like I had been.
I didn’t try to cheer her up. I told her that both of those feelings were reasonable. I told her that university is not one thing—it’s a container that holds wildly different experiences depending on the person, the course, the city, and the timing. It can be transformative for one student and painfully ordinary for another. The same campus can produce both outcomes.
What helped Maya wasn’t my reassurance that it would be fine. It was asking her different questions. Not “which course do you want to do?”—she was already tired of that one—but smaller, more practical ones.
I asked her: “What does a typical Tuesday look like in the course you’re applying for?” She had no idea. We looked at the timetable together, and she saw that some courses had lecture-free Tuesdays, which meant independent study. She had to think about whether she could manage that kind of self-direction. She didn’t know. I pointed out that her sixth-form college had forced study periods, so she’d never actually tested herself on that.
I asked her to look at the second-year modules, not just the first-year ones because lots of people choose a university based on the introductory course but disengage when the real content starts. I asked her to read the actual essay questions in the course handbook. One sample question about public health policy genuinely interested her—she didn’t just find it tolerable, she wanted to respond to it. That one moment meant more than any campus tour.
We also talked about the things that don’t appear in leaflets. What happens if you get ill in your second year? What happens if you realise you hate the city? What’s the policy on taking a year out mid-degree? Bleak questions, but they’re the ones that matter when you’re living it at 2am during exam season and the radiator is hissing and you haven’t left your room in two days.
Maya eventually decided to apply, but to three very different universities rather than the cluster of similar ones her friends were choosing. She looked for places with smaller seminar groups, more written feedback on essays, and a city culture she could imagine walking through on a rainy January morning. Those things seem mundane, but they shape what your actual days will be like.
I’ve also noticed my own attitude shifting. I used to want her to go to university because it would validate my own path. I think a lot of parents project that. We want our kids to repeat our choices so we can feel that we did the right thing. Or we want them to avoid our mistakes and feel, slightly resentfully, that they had it easier. Both impulses are bad guides.
The honest position is that university is an option, not an obligation. It might be brilliant and it might be a disappointment. It might lead to a career she loves, or it might be a three-year pause before her real life starts. I don’t know anymore. And that’s okay.
We’re still in the process. Applications are submitted, offers are trickling in, and Maya is talking about biology and teaching, which sounds like her talking about enjoying working with teenagers at a summer camp. She changes her mind every few weeks. I don’t correct her. We’re both just trying to figure out what the next step should be, and our conversations are better for admitting we don’t have the answers yet.
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