The uni lifestyle is incredibly enticing, the prospect of learning something new is alluring and the whole uni thing just sounds like a helluva great time.  

Uni was never on the cards for me when I was growing up, well, at least I thought it wasn’t.

When I was in year 12 and everyone was choosing what they wanted to be when they grew up, I avoided those conversations.

I felt like I was mediocre at a lot of things, but I didn’t thrive or excel at anything in particular.

I remember that we had this massive textbook full of career prospects in our VCE room. I’d pretty much flick open pages and go home telling my mum I was thinking of a career in homeopathy (without even knowing what it was).

So when our ENTER or ATAR scores came out (or whatever they get called now) I kind of surprised myself – I didn’t do too badly.

So I booked in to see my careers adviser and looked up at her with my ENTER score like a lost puppy and said “what the hell do I do with this?”.

She suggested I go to uni.

So what do you do when you know you’re going to uni? You get new books! And pens! And Post-It notes! And more pens!

I was going to be a real-life uni student, I was destined for academic greatness.

I was going to take notes in lectures, make new friends and join a drama club or maybe the banter and meme society (this is an actual thing FYI). I couldn’t wait.

But uni didn’t exactly match the image I had in my head.

The classes were hard, mainly because I was doing a Bachelor of Arts so I was doing a lot of different subjects.

Philosophy sounded fun when I chose it, but it was really difficult and confusing … and who the hell is Plato?

I struggled to make friends. I pretty much thought that going to uni meant you immediately gain a couple of dozen friends.

It is actually the opposite because you have different subjects and different tutorials a lot of the time.

One night during O-Week, I went to one of the events and after an hour of standing in the corner awkwardly, I walked out. Yes, in tears.

And I didn’t go to another event.

I know a lot of teenagers are probably looking at that massive textbook full of careers options at the moment. It’s stressful.

You go from wanting to be a doctor to wanting to be unemployed and live at home forever – all in the space of 60 seconds.

I should mention, I didn’t last at uni. I finished the first semester out and then left.

It wasn’t because of the study or the fact I struggled to fit into uni life.

It was because I didn’t know what I wanted to do or what I even liked.

So far, I knew it wasn’t philosophy.

I felt really embarrassed being a uni drop-out.

I didn’t want to disappoint anyone, and I really cared about what people thought, so I’d just tell people I was deferring for a year but I didn’t have any real intentions of returning. Over time, I’ve realised that I had countless other life experiences after uni that taught me valuable lessons.

I didn’t learn them in a lecture theatre, but they were still valuable lessons.

If you’re passionate about something or you have a career you need to study for, uni is the perfect place.

My uni experience was born from thinking I “should” do it because everyone else was doing it – and that motivation is just an expensive time-waster.

If every time you think about the prospect of going to uni, it makes you want to barf into your backpack remember Oprah dropped out of the Tennessee State University and Sir Richard Branson didn’t even bother going and things turned out OK for them.

A fancy degree doesn’t always have to define your idea of success.

Only you can define what success means to you.

Riley-Rose Harper can be heard on Hit 104.9 from 6-9am on weekdays.