Photo Credit : James Surowiecki | The New Yorker

By: Ochi Maduabuchi

Happy resumption! I wish I had said that in the first week, and it is entirely my fault. I was hoping to get a space in the hostel. How foolish of me. I should have known better than to expect the school to provide accommodation for the students it admits.

Sure, one would think the University has detailed data on the number of returning and incoming students, as well as the available hostel spaces. But I now understand that acting on that data is not only incredibly difficult, it is also a grave mistake. I mean, I do the same. I know exams are just weeks away, yet I don’t start reading until the night before. Expecting anything different from the ever-magnanimous school management would be unfair. After all, they are the constituted authority. Every thing they do is divine and right and unquestionable.

Had I known earlier that I wouldn’t be allocated a hostel space before resumption, I might have made other arrangements more easily. But who am I kidding? Trying to juggle classes while searching for accommodation isn’t just the best way to find a new place, it is also the perfect way to cope with an already hectic academic workload. I had to find whatever I could afford as quickly as possible. And my agent, the good Lord bless him, didn’t take disadvantage of me or lower the price of the spaces he showed me. He gave me the best deal of life. I may have missed three weeks of lectures while waiting for hostel allocation, but now I live like a king in a tiny space my father had to sell our family farm to afford.

Fortunately for me, aside from the one course in which I’m now somewhat caught up, I’ve simply left my future in God’s hands and pray I don’t fail the semester. As it turns out, the Hall Warden is actually the main lecturer for that course, and because he spent nearly half the semester doing the divine work of distributing rooms, I was able to keep up in that one class.

But I’m genuinely worried about the rest of my courses this semester. I’ve fallen so far behind that I barely even know what some of them are. Some misguided people might assume that my poor academic imbalance is due to my late resumption. They would wrongly blame the delay in hostel allocation for staylites like me, which starts well after the academic calendar has begun. But they’d be completely wrong. Clearly, the problem is with me! Isn’t it always easier to blame me?

How thoughtless of me! The accommodation process is so transparent and efficient that I should have known well in advance whether or not I’d been assigned a space. I should have used my expert betting and gambling skills to predict my hostel fate. It’s all so clear now, in hindsight, how much better I could have handled everything.

Anyway, that’s been my situation. How have you all been? I know I might sound sad and bitter, but this is actually me happy and excited. I hope things have been just as great for you as they’ve been for me.