Triumphant, barely

Brittany Travers outside the University of Otago clocktower building in her graduation gown....
Brittany Travers outside the University of Otago clocktower building in her graduation gown. Photo: supplied.
The giddy euphoria of graduation made for a truly memorable day, writes Brittany Travers.

To celebrate finishing our dissertations at the University of Otago, my friend  and I jumped in her car after a pot-luck dinner and headed out to Brighton Beach.

It was a pitch black, freezing Dunedin October night. We wanted to go skinny-dipping to  exultantly celebrate finishing off our dissertations. We wanted to go swimming at the main beach, near the Brighton Dairy. But we chickened out: we saw a strange car with the engine still running, but no-one in it. We thought, we don’t want to get mugged. Let’s drive around to the neighbouring beach.

Sure enough, we plucked up the courage to leap, squealing with delight, into the freezing cold waters. We ran past caves that jutted out from the golden beach: in the moonlight, the sand shone with a dusty brown glow.

Once in the water, we leapt around and screamed, "I can’t believe we actually did it!".

It was a feeling of pure joy and ecstasy to know that after all the years of study, blood, sweat and tears, it had finally paid off: we’d got our dissertations behind us.

We didn’t stay too long galavanting around in the frothy black waves, because we didn’t want to end up with  hypothermia. That would have seriously worried my father. So after diving headfirst into the waves, we quick-smart ran back out again, rugged up in the car and drove to George St where we bought a cookie pizza from that pizza place that used to be next to The Bog Irish tavern.

Nothing comes close to having an adventure and sharing a moment of pure joy with a friend. I’ll never forget it. We are  close friends to this day.

- Brittany Travers now works for the public service in Wellington. She enjoys union activism, poetry, and politics. Her dissertation was in French cinema, an analysis of how French novel La Princesse de Cleves was brought to life for the big screen.

 

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