When I started university in September 2020, I wasn’t in a lecture hall with hundreds of strangers, or exploring campus, or getting to grips with living away from home for the first time after being dropped off by my proud parents.
Instead, I was in my childhood bedroom when I was introduced to my course for the first time through a virtual meeting. While coronavirus ripped through the country, I spent one of the most formative years of my life at home, studying through a screen. I found my best friends in a breakout room over Zoom during a teaching session and didn’t meet them in person until three months later.
I didn’t feel very hopeful about how the first few years of university were going to turn out, so I tried to feel optimistic about how life would be after graduation – and after the pandemic. I’m now set to graduate from my medical degree in July. However, that rare sense of optimism I clung to at the start of my degree is nowhere to be found. Six years later, when the pandemic is just a bad memory to many people, it feels as though I’m still watching an equally uncertain world through the same window.
My generation is stereotyped as lazy, unwilling to save money and afraid to commit to things, with some employers admitting they are less likely to hire Gen Z applicants compared to other candidates. We’re told that the state of our lives is a generational trait, that our struggles are self-made and that we need to pull our socks up and just “get on with it”.
Over the years, I’ve faced comments on placement from senior figures about how medical students from “my generation” aren’t willing to study as hard, that we’re too sensitive and are lazy. Once, an older person said it was “easier” for me to get into medicine, because my A-level exams were cancelled. I thought it was a joke – but they were very serious. What they didn’t realise was the sheer stress of it all. Being reduced to nothing but an academic pick ‘n’ mix is an experience I still haven’t forgotten.
People don’t realise that the most formative years of our lives were affected by Covid-19. We felt it more intensely even then. One study by the Mental Health Foundation found that during the pandemic, young people aged 18 to 24 were more likely than any other age group to report feeling hopeless, lonely or suicidal. By the fifth Covid wave, 19 per cent of all Britons reported feeling hopeless but 32 per cent of those between 18 and 24 did.
This deeper impact on youth has lasted. We’re more likely to be affected by the changes Covid-19 has had on society, because we’re the ones starting our adult lives in an unexpected version of the world. From the impact lockdown had on cognitive development and social interactions, to the way the job market and the economy are still weathering the impact – and we’re the ones facing it.
It’s a very rough time to be a young person, whether you went to university or not. Even traditional degrees with the promise of stable employment are threatened. I studied medicine, historically one of the more reliable routes into stable, long-term employment. However, resident doctors including myself face the prospect of unemployment within just two years of graduation.
After two foundation years, we apply for training in specialisms, to become GPs and consultants – but last year more than 30,000 doctors applied for around 10,000 training places. Last July, 52 per cent of resident doctors had no job secured for that August. Friends of mine who are already qualified doctors live with this anxiety daily, and others have already made plans to leave the NHS after completing resident training.
Add to that the feeling that the world is becoming increasingly hostile. I have watched the world burning in real time alongside friends who are directly affected by it. Closer to home, the rise of parties like Reform feels divisive and threatening, particularly as the daughter of Muslim immigrants.
None of this is to claim that my generation has suffered uniquely. But six years after the outbreak began, I still feel a sense of grief at the time that was lost in the first few years of university. While it’s made me more intentional about the way I spend my time now, and not taking the freedoms of life for granted, it has equally made me a more cautious person, and someone who tries to balance the feeling of dread, and optimism of the future at the same time.
Come July I will be in my graduation gown, walking across the stage in Liverpool to receive my degree after six years of studying medicine. My peers and I are going to be entering a society none of us were prepared for when we first joined university at 18. And that scares me.
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