Teen Times: It's 9am on a Thursday. We step off the bus onto the UCD campus. We are not college students, but fifth-year secondary school girls here on an open day; pretending for the day that we're older and more sophisticated, like those college-goers who drink cups of coffee and talk about their lectures and the corporations.
We go to get something to eat, and to get out of the weather; we have an hour to kill before our first lecture.
But it is a scary thought. Give us just one short year and we can vote in the government, we can drive the cars on the road and we will take over from the last generation as the movers and shakers of the country.
Scarier still is the amount of serious, long-term decisions we are faced with. Grown-up decisions.
Decisions we have to live with for years after. Nothing like getting your hair cut, hating it and having to live with it for a couple of weeks - decisions that have a reel of consequences attached.
An obvious example, your subjects you choose for fifth year are the subjects you take for the Leaving Cert. The subjects you take for the Leaving Cert are the subjects that give you the points for the college course you do. The college course you do will determine what career you'll have. It's a scary thought when you really just took the class because your friends did, or the college course because it sounded easy.
As I stood on the path at that bus stop, I realised that, to date, the most grown-up thing I had thought about was my driving theory test, and even that was too scarily grown-up for my liking; I hadn't thought of anything to the effect of whether or not I was interested in computer science or theoretical physics. Are 17-year-olds supposed to think about that? I can barely spell theoretical!
The thought of getting older, waving a melancholy goodbye to "the best days of our lives", going to college and perhaps moving out, is unnerving to say the least. There isn't the same security as being young and living at home.
I can't ask my dad for help with my maths homework, can I? Or ask my mum for a lift somewhere? On the other hand, being older means I can drive myself places, or ask my sophisticated college buddies for help.
For all the small, childish inhibitions I may have, I can see the older and wiser side of me working out the solutions. Like, if I want to share a house or apartment with friends, I find myself thinking about loans, or, if I'm looking at a college, I can find myself wondering whether or not it's in a practical location. I even find myself stepping back and wondering if I really need another pair of shoes.
Lisa Dunn is a fifth-year student at Sancta Maria College, Knocklyon, Dublin 16
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