I was in my final year at FUTO and I will not pretend it was anything other than survival. Final year project, departmental exams, family expectations about results, NYSC preparations, job applications, and the underlying terror that everything I\'d worked towards for four years could unravel in a single semester. I didn\'t sleep more than four hours most nights. I lost weight. I cried in the library on three separate occasions, including once in a study cubicle at 2am when I thought no one could hear me. Someone heard me.
The person who heard me was another final year student who had been in the same cubicle and had been silently crying herself for twenty minutes before I started. We became close friends. I tell this story not to make it romantic but because I think it illustrates something important: we are all struggling in ways we are not saying out loud, and sometimes proximity to someone else\'s honest struggle is the only permission we give ourselves to acknowledge our own.
The university counsellor I eventually saw was one of the most helpful people I met that year — but I had been there three years before I knew the counselling office existed. Nobody told us. That is a failure of institutions, not of students.
If you are a current final year student reading this: what you are feeling is real, it is common, and it is not weakness. Please find someone to talk to — a friend, a counsellor, a community like this one. The project matters, but not more than you.