The World is a Much Bigger Place

By John Nnamchi, Canadian student at McGill University, graduating class of 2017

As the end of the semester approaches the pace by which the past year has gone by is remarkable. For some, it is the end of first year discoveries, for others, graduation and entry into the real world awaits. What may be more striking than the realization of yet another completed year, though, is the diversity of paths each and every one of us take immediately after this period: it is impossible to find any two classmates who led remotely similar lives this past summer. Take the most mundane example of two life science students, under-taking summer research in the same lab. I can guarantee that neither one’s experience will be remotely close in similarity. Expanding this thinking to all your peers dotted around different fields, the possible walks of life grow beyond control.

These realizations lead to a newfound awareness about the journeys of life: there are too many to count, too many follow, too many to conceive. I am writing this because such a level of thinking did not exist for me as a student still in high school. My world revolved around those I knew, and strangers didn’t exist. Yet, as I entered university, my student body grew from 300 to 6000 people and in my first year it seemed the amount of people to meet was endless. If six thousand students seemed like too many, imagine six billion. So if asked what the greatest thing to have taken out during one’s time in university, it is the awareness that the world is a lot bigger than it seems.