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University is a transformative experience. I can say this from experience greater than most. When I started here in the ancient times of the mid-2000s, I was a quiet, socially awkward-though-unfailingly-polite individual, and now, years later, I'm a... huh.

Look, maybe that's not the best way to frame it. Point is, I know that I've undergone enormous change in the time I've been here: mentally, physically, emotionally, and just about every other change you can make, short of gender.

I speak of myself because it is myself that I know better than anyone else, but I know that for anyone who really immerses themselves in their university years, they can't help but undergo change. It's unavoidable. But the nature of that change, and the extent to which it manifests, is entirely a product of choice.

Which, quite apart from the classes and the qualifications and the deadlines and the assignments, is what university serves as: a means to provide you with choices, and the maturity to handle them. The choice to study; the choice to think about studying; the choice to reject studying and instead sit on Tumblr looking at photos of cats. The choice to associate with some people; the choice to not associate with them; the choice to take time out for yourself and think about the world. The choice to join a club; the choice to play a sport; the choice to stand on a stage in frilly underwear and perform to an audience of several hundred.

These choices are many, and it is these choices that define who you are as a person, but they are not the choices that are always presented to you in a UCan advertisement or on a billboard (certainly not the "frilly underwear" choice, anyway). They are the choices which you only stumble on through experience. Some of them are choices whose importance the university experience teaches you to recognise, beyond the thousands of minutiae we face every day, of which our conscious mind is scarcely aware. They are those choices that require a certain extra step.

There are people who will come here who only ever see it as a means to a qualification. In, out; stamp my passport, send me on my way. That attitude is very appealing because it's easy, but it never realises the full breadth of possibility that the tertiary education experience has to offer.

Because university is itself, above all else, a choice to become and remain aware of the life around you. In order to make the most of that choice, you need to make further choices to consider all the opportunities it offers you. And that means getting involved and investing yourself and doing something. Not waiting for a future you're working towards, but experiencing every moment now to its fullest, and taking the paths that are not always obvious.

Which is why I need to thank everyone who has written for Canta for doing just that, because it always represents a step outside the norm, and that is not always easy. And though picking up an issue of Canta is probably only a small choice, thank you to you for making that choice, too. It's been a pleasure.

And now, I'll leave you forever with a line I cribbed from Warren Zevon for my very first Canta article many years ago:

Enjoy every sandwich.