Student Life
Undergrad's underground
By: Ovidiu Rauca
Vivid is glad to welcome Ovidiu Rauca, a fourth year student of computing, to its team of writers. His first article expounds on the identity crisis facing Romanian students today
Posted: 29/03/2008
Romanian students are caught in a bind.
Apart from the media beat-ups, the sensation - such as the lack of proper dorms and the ever changing curriculae, or a gloating dean bragging about the success of an elite few that predictably win prizes year after year in international competitions - very little else is reported.
But it should, because there is a more subtle and very dangerous issue that confronts the whole mass of students.
Students here are caught a bind. On the one hand, we just want to import a Western lifestyle and embrace everything Western as hurriedly as possible - but on the other hand we are mindful of preserving our unique Romanian spirit. The long, often painful transitional years of moving to a functional market economy when we had to make all kind of sacrifices are behind us; now we just want to be as European as we can be.
The crucial element for the metamorphosis towards a full Western lifestyle is, of course, money. Students only have one means of obtaining money, and that is through their parents. If their parents do not have money then they effectively have to stop being a student, and go and live in the "real world", as parents like to call it.
The problem is so obvious that nobody can see it, or nobody wants to see it. The fact is that students simply don't want to be students any more. They don't want to study, they don't want to live the bohemian lifestyle associated with student life because they can't afford it. They don't want to pursue their dreams any more; rather, they just simply want to work to have money to have everything that is advertised everywhere.
The sad thing about it is that I am one of those students who does not work, if I ever was one to begin with. So how can I pretend to talk about a student identity crisis if I don't feel like a student?
It is because I feel cheated, that for the past four years that is what I thought I am. When someone would asked me who I was, I would instinctively answer with the first thing that popped into my head, which was "Well, I am a student!" Every other category - man, Romanian, Orthodox - came afterwards. I was a student, first and foremost. Perhaps this was because everybody else tells us what we are, and we simply choose to trust them and not judge for ourselves. If we do that we arrive at the conclusion that we are nothing like our parents used to be when they were students, or like other students from other countries.
We are just like crazy explorers searching for the Indies, and that should be fine as long as we are all Christopher Columbus, who ended by discovering a new world and changing history like many of the student elite have the capacity to do. But what happens to the rest, the ordinary ones, the ones that should become politicians, economists, doctors, engineers?
I wonder how I will fare after finishing this chapter of my life that has lasted long enough already. I wonder what will become of me, of us all. Will we be good enough engineers, economists, teachers, doctors? Will I be able to contribute to society moving towards the Western model that we yearn for?
One thing is certain. The future will tell us whether the Romanian way of improvising solutions without the proper means can make it right this time too.
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