My Seniors

A notification popped up on my Facebook earlier today. It was a friend commenting on an old video made and posted on facebook by a friend of mine. It was a video of our seniors saying farewell to us juniors since their time in Macquarie University, Sydney was up and they had to get on planes back to Malaysia. The whole content of the video was them either at the airport or just heading to the airport, just saying goodbye and giving us their final pieces of advice.

Watching it reminded me of how close we had grown to each other during that short year of being around each other. This was especially true for me since from the get go, I had stayed with nine of them up until their final days in uni. I had started as a super-introverted guy, really really shy with all of them since I wasn’t all that close to them during the teacher training institute days. Some might have seen me as a sombong guy, and I don’t blame them since I barely spoke around them in the early days. In truth, I was afraid of them. They were my seniors and they knew so many things that I didn’t know, and were so close to each other that when I was thrown into the mix, I felt like such an outsider, not worthy of mingling with them since I would just be a nuisance.

But as time went on, I warmed up to them and they warmed up to me. We got close to each other through time spent with each other and just going through problems as a unit. We had our troubled days, yes, but in the bigger scheme of things, those problems ended up bringing us closer together and opened up doors for us to trust each other more. We’d have late night talks, either at home or at the Auburn Macca’s. They helped me a lot in a lot of regards, from giving advice on assignments to trying to retrieve stolen property, among other things. I am very grateful I was blessed with their company.

It was a bit weird to see them again in light of today. What I mean is, back then, they were so much wiser than us in comparison. How much just one more year in a university in a foreign country can make to people. I still view them as wise people today. But as both cohorts have grown into the teaching profession now, we aren’t seen as that much different from each other anymore. It wouldn’t be such a stretch to say that we can now be considered equals. We have both gone through teacher training, which included a couple of years overseas, and are now relatively new teachers in all our schools. If a senior teacher who’d been in the profession for 20 years already took a look at both our cohorts, they’d say we were the same.

To me, they’ll always be my seniors. The ones that helped me through a lot during my years overseas especially. But it just struck me while thinking about it how everyone else who weren’t with us during those years would ever know how we have affected each others’ lives, how much hardships we’ve been through together, how much fun we’ve had together. Some of us have kept in touch, while some others have fizzled out of contact with each other. Despite that fact, there will always be that special place in both our memories and our hearts of Macquarie University, Sydney in the year 2011.