University: The best three years of your life?

Your time at university is often made out to be the best three years of your life; in a way I can see why people would think that because it's your chance to finally decide how you should live your life and be free from the restrictions of your parents, not to mention the fact that you get more lie-ins. But even with all these new found freedoms, is this time really something you'll treasure for the rest of your life?

I certainly don't regret going to university because I've now got a degree that will allow me to access more potential job opportunities and it gave me the chance to learn Arabic from a native speaker. I've already experienced the advantage of the former to a certain extent as I've done an internship with a law firm, I'm currently doing another internship involving translations of legal German and I've also had the opportunity to observe proceedings at the UN.

The other advantage of university is that it helps you to grow up. I certainly feel that being at university has not only helped my career path but that it has also taught me a lot of valuable life lessons as you have to learn to: balance domestic chores with your studies, cook for yourself, learn to live within a budget and learn how to pick the right house and housemates. Of course you can learn these lessons without the aid of a degree but I feel that university helped this process along as it can sometimes be hard to cope with these responsibilities, so it was useful to go home in the holidays and work out how you could better manage these demands, particularly as your parents can usually impart some useful wisdom on these matters.

Nevertheless, despite these advantages, I don't feel that these 3 years have been the best years of my life. Some of my problems relate to the degree as I felt at times that we weren't made to write enough essays even though law degrees are assessed on the basis of essays. I also disliked the fact that the degree content was sometimes diluted to the point where I wasn't learning a lot of useful knowledge.
Other problems related to the fact that while university helps you to grow up, it can take you a while to adapt to these new found responsibilities to the point where a lot of the new found freedoms aren't as exciting as they seem when you're in sixth form. 

However, the remainder of my problems relate to the social side of university. I can't claim that everyone there was bad as I met my current boyfriend there and I've certainly enjoyed my relationship with him. But aside from my boyfriend, I haven't made any deep friendships that I plan to maintain now that university's over. Time and time again, I found that the people I met were either immature, selfish, arrogant, petty, two-faced or just didn't share my interests. So my boyfriend was the only person there, with whom I could really be open and honest.

You may wonder if the title accurately describes the content of this blog post given that I've so far only spoken of my experiences but my close friends and others, who I've met, have also experienced the same problems at university. I know that for some their time at university is one of the best times of their life but there are many people for whom this isn't the case.