“They always told me: take advantage of your 18 years and your first years of study, it is the best time of your life”Estelle (the students interviewed did not want to give their surname) is 25 years old. So when the time comes to leave the cocoon of her family to settle in Lille and begin her English studies, the young woman wants to follow the advice she has been constantly given to follow to the letter.
It has many integration evenings and after-school drinks. With one goal: “I had a very strict adolescence where I couldn’t go out. When I arrived in Lille, I really wanted to meet people who looked like me. I was looking for these people everywhere.” Excited by her new life, Estelle doesn’t realize she’s going out every night. “For several months I didn’t spend a single night alone at home. I no longer had a life outside of parties, my life was being out and about with people. I became a ghost of myself, she observed years later.
Estelle realized she had a problem during the Covid-19 pandemic. Back with her parents in the northern countryside, she first takes some time to rest and recover from her three hectic years of student life. “Once I was tired, I felt a sense of loss, I was still afraid of missing an afternoon when the world had stopped completely.”she says. This worry that Estelle felt is called Fomo syndrome. (acronym for Fear of missing out). “Fomo is the fear of missing out, of not being on point, explains Maïté Tranzer, a clinical psychologist in Paris. As part of student life, young people will go to parties “just in case”, so as not to regret not having been there”.
“I had to be everywhere, all the time”
According to Maïté Tranzer, this feeling is very common at the time of student integration: “When you start your studies, you often want to fit into the mould; otherwise, you quickly feel out of place and can feel rejected. This can reinforce past wounds. We want at all costs to be present in order to boost our self-esteem, to seek attention, to be considered. »
Sociologist Julien Berthaud, a doctor of educational sciences from the University of Burgundy, worked on the social integration of university students. He describes this period as one of “double process with a lot of transitions and breaks between secondary school and higher education,” two very different worlds. “Young students move from a very structured environment with fixed schedules to a place where you have to fend for yourself, with a network that is generally not the same as before. The student must both create his or her identity within this network and acquire its codes. he analyzes.
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