Beyond being a route to acquiring skills and job opportunities, universities serve an even greater role that we often under-appreciate. Beyond being a learning institution, universities are the structured playgrounds where youth can frolic for the last time. Universities are where people forge lasting friendships, adopt life changing principles and ideas, and get into scrapes and shenanigans that become sources of life’s important lessons. Universities are where we collect the often too brief memories of unbridled youth. Where we enter as adolescents and leave as young adults. Where we become.
My fondest memories during undergraduate studies are the many shenanigans that I experienced with my friends. From debate training past midnight to the unsanctioned operations to “raise awareness” to coordinating the establishment of a student resource center and rehearsals for staging a play. These are the collective memories that I tap into when I want to remember my youth-- a time when I had time and freedom to do what I wanted to do (as long as it was free or cheap).
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Dr Khayriyyah Mohd Hanafiah
Dr Khayriyyah Mohd Hanafiah is an honorary fellow at Macfarlane Burnet Institute (Melbourne, Australia) and an alum of the Young Scientists Network-Academy of Sciences Malaysia. She is active in science communication and infectious disease biomedical research. She was the first female Asian champion of FameLab, the world’s longest running science communication competition, in 2018. The writer’s views are her own.
