What is a coming of age story? Boiled down to its core concept it’s about the transition from childhood to adulthood and has spawned countless books and films. Whether you are a devout lover of the genre or absolutely hate it, if I were to ask you to name a coming of age story, it is almost a guarantee you would choose a title featuring high school-aged characters. It is a staple, if not defining feature of the genre. 

I have been thinking a lot recently about my high school graduation, maybe because I will be graduating again in only a few short months. I am part of the Covid classes that didn’t get a conventional graduation. 

My high school graduation consisted of a box containing my diploma, a graduation cap, and confetti popper from my school and watching a livestream of a prerecorded video on my parents’ television. I did not walk across a stage, instead my picture scrolled by on a screen alongside a list of the various accomplishments of my diploma. 

I have heard countless people, including my fellow students, say it was terribly underwhelming and my collective graduating year deserved better, though I would much rather what we got than dying of Covid, which was a definite possibility at the time. 

Perhaps it is because of this lacklustre graduation event, or my transition straight from high school into university without taking a gap year the way many of my friends and peers did, but I feel that my coming of age did not happen in high school, but instead over my past four years in university. 

University seems to lend itself much better to the transitional period that coming of age stories are concerned with: the transition from childhood to adulthood. How you describe this transition really depends on how you describe childhood and adulthood, and what makes them distinct from each other. 

The years spent in university are marked by a series of firsts. Students often move out of their parents house, have to pay bills and do taxes. They are completely in control of their life for the first time. If any period of your life were to be defined as a transition between childhood and adulthood, university seems like the easy choice. 

Ultimately, though, holding up a single time in your life to be your picture perfect coming of age story will not leave you with anything more than disappointment. Life is full of transitions from one stage to the next, and there is no perfect moment you will achieve where you feel like an adult. 

If there is, I certainly have not reached it. There is so much focus put on a single moment to mark the before and after. There is graduation, where before you are a student and after you are a graduate, and that particular ceremony has to be perfect. 

From an anthropological perspective this makes sense. Across history and cultures coming of age is marked by rituals. We have a number in Western culture, your 18th birthday, marriage, and of course school graduations. 

There has been a lot of attention recently towards the decision to hold Trent’s convocation in the Athletics Centre and not on Bata Podium this year. 

It is a drama I cannot bring myself to care about. 

I was already mostly expecting to have graduation in the Athletics Centre. I have spent the past three summers in Peterborough, I know the amount of rain we get in early June. Graduation is not the pinnacle or summary of my university experience, I have done so many more cool or interesting things that I would rather remember when I look back on this time in 20 years than where on campus I walked across the stage to get my diploma. 

Life is not a coming of age film, we will never get a picture perfect moment to define our transition to adulthood, you just have to be an adult.