On Saturday I graduated with my undergraduate degrees.
Well, technically, as I graduated in absentia I wasn't actually there to stride across the stage in my cap and gown.
But the lady at the graduation office told me congratulations when I went to collect my certificates and it really threw me.
For the past three years I have been working on a bachelor of arts majoring in English literature, and a diploma in language endorsed in French language.
I'd thought briefly about how it might feel to finally have both of those qualifications, to be able to list them on my curriculum vitae, to be able to have them framed on my wall, but I had sort of forgotten that the amount of work that went into getting those pieces of paper was worthy of congratulation.
Students are so overburdened by class work and social commitments that I don't think we really get the chance to realise the weight of what we are doing a lot of the time.
The student loan process makes it pretty easy to just forget you are paying an absolutely absurd amount of money for the privilege of suffering over assignments in freezing flats.
And of course, if you're not ignoring letters from Studylink reminding you of the enormous sum you owe to the government, then there's some chance you've paid your fees with real money.
I suppose then you know how much it has cost you but it might not haunt you for the rest of your life.
It's not only the far-off concept of thousands of dollars that distances us from our degrees, but also a sense of not really knowing what we are doing, or knowing that what we study has a certain professional outcome and so foregoing thinking about the present in favour of a vague conception of your pre-determined working life.
All this time we spend going to lectures, or not going and feeling guilty (or just falling fast asleep), and wandering around a campus where almost no-one knows or cares who you are makes it quite easy to forget you are actually working towards something.
When you graduate, the university gives you a copy of your academic transcript with a pretty gold seal.
The transcript has not only the letter grade you received for every paper you took while at university, but also the percentage you scored in each of those papers.
I've looked at my academic record before, but seeing it all laid out and totalling two qualifications was interesting.
I got sucked into thinking about all the hours I put into each of those classes and all of night-before-exam meltdowns I'd had, convinced I just wasn't going to do well enough.
There are subjects and areas on my transcript I am still passionate about, but there are some things where I don't remember why I could possibly have wanted to put myself through them.
In my first year I studied music, a very bad idea that is now thankfully a distant memory.
I hated it so much, but I still worked harder than I probably ever worked in my university career, acing something I knew I wasn't going to continue with.
I did much better at university than I did at high school and yet I was studying for my undergraduate degree for only slightly longer than half the time I spent at high school, and just a smidgen of the time I spent in the school system altogether.
It's hard to say whether I worked harder at university than I did at school, but I still don't really feel like I know anything.
Looking at my degree makes me feel simultaneously proud and terrified.
In two years I am probably going to forget a lot of what I learned in my literary theory classes, and maybe my French will have abandoned me altogether.
But I will still have read a lot of books, written a lot of essays, and done a lot of exams.
And I suppose my certificates will hopefully remind me not only of my hulking student loan, but also of what I achieved in my studies.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
