Eternal sunshine of the spotless alumni

It wasn’t until I opened an alumni account that I finally came to terms with losing access to my university emails.

In the weeks leading up to my graduation ceremony, I received an email from my university warning me that my student address would soon be defunct. Everything that was attached to my academic studies — from my Outlook email to my Moodle profile — would disappear, like tears in rain. I thought nothing of it at first. With my two-week celebratory London trip around the corner, I already had my hands full with last-minute itinerary additions and carry-on luggage strategising.

One post-graduation trip later, I caught up with my uni friends at a hearty Italian dig near Town Hall, where we helped ourselves to overpriced pizzas and wine. As I fought through my jetlag under dim lights, one of my classmates asked me if I still planned to back-up my undergrad material soon. 

“You don’t wanna lose all that stuff,” he told me as he detailed the amount of work it took to download gigabytes worth of Echo360 lectures and weekly readings.

I made little effort in gathering these relics. When I followed the steps to backing up my Outlook emails, I recall giving up halfway through the process. I took even less effort with salvaging my library of readings and lecturers from my Moodle profile.

It wasn’t until I opened an alumni account that I finally came to terms with losing access to my university emails. Every attempt to access my Outlook student email was met with a wall of error messages and imposing text. I kept refreshing the page with unwavering hope. But alas, I descended into this sinking, yet strange grief that could only exist within this digital realm — an inaccessible space that sat between the borders of undergrad and newly grad.

These weren’t just assessments I was losing — it was an entire trove of memories that documented and preserved my earliest (albeit cringe) impressions of academic writing. Take-home exams on Gertrude Stein and W.H. Auden slipped out of my hands. Diary logs of my second-year practice as a fledgling performance artist, now abandoned in the pixelated wasteland. So, too, were my major essays on Claudia Rankine, Mariko Mori, PTA’s Punch-Drunk Love, and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight — all of which reflected my ever-evolving tastes in art and cinema.

Other relics in my academic career stood out more personally against the rest. I still remember my American Literature paper on Allen Ginsberg and Elizabeth Bishop, which not only earned me a HD, but also an evening at a Hunter S Thompson-themed bar with my lecturer and other top-ranked classmates. On the flipside, there was the small blunder I made in another essay on Samuel Coleridge’s “The Nightingale” in which I expressed how much the poet “feels a fuck-ton about a moon.” In response to this slip-up, my marker could only comment with a single quizzical question mark.

There was much more academic ephemera to be left behind. 

I parted ways with the email I sent to my first-year Art History tutor in which I disclosed my anxiety, to which he responded by disclosing his own ADHD and stressing the importance of mental health. 

I still remember my year worth of correspondence with my Honours supervisor, where we’d have the occasional tête-à-tête over the shitshow I call Philippine politics. 

And let’s not forget the few lecture recordings that caught some “too good to be true” moments — including the time my British poetry lecturer recited Dr. Seuss and the Sugarhill Gang, and another time when my art theory lecturer deliberately spilled water over himself in front of fifty-odd undergrads (“I can guarantee that even in five years time, when you get into higher degree research, this lecture will stay with you in memory.”).

Thankfully, there were a few assessments I managed to salvage from the proverbial house fire, fated to crumble like the Library of Alexandria. I still had my graphic media projects on brand books and portfolios, many of which were designed on my heated shitbrick of a Windows laptop. 

My first-year essays on Blade Runner, Double Indemnity, and The Passion of Joan of Arc were now rehomed in a special spot on my desktop. 

My proudest possession was an experimental short story I submitted in a creative writing unit, detailing some unhinged, yet poetic expressions of my depression in late 2017 (“His chest and tongue cemented into gravestones. He cried out nothing.”).

I had my reasons to be sentimental. Reading assessments from my early days of uni ignited a wave of Proustian sensations — it’s taking a bite of ratatouille or honey madeleine before being plunged into the deepest caverns of memory. However, if I had to mature and evolve, these pockets of academic history must be left behind.

It’s natural to reminisce on your academic labour, to reflect on past relics and perk up a smile by bathing in nostalgia. But I’m also wise enough to accept that student life shouldn’t have to be measured by Turnitin submissions and professorial emails. There was much more to value about university beyond the digital realm: the campus art openings, creative publication launches, free food at society stalls, and after-study drinks to name a few.

I did my double degree for so long, I joke about how university life would never escape me. And, admittedly, it is yet to. I sometimes return to campus as a creature comfort whenever I need the space to write, design, or wander about with my own internal monologue. But there was no reason to regress back into undergrad nostalgia, especially if it’s done to bypass my current discomforts with unemployment. As much as I wanted to save the junkyard of essays and reflection statements, I’d already outgrown the high-strung arts student.

It was about time I parted ways with my Moodle days — to finally brave the terrifying yet liberating freedoms of alumni living.