Name: Jarlath Regan
Occupation: Comedian based in London. His podcast, An Irishman Abroad , in which he interviews well-known Irish people for an hour, has more than one million listeners per episode.
Education: University College Dublin
“Back then people used to say there was ‘no talking to me’. So if I could go back to 1999 and give myself some wise words before I went to UCD to study I’d be very careful. The me that headed up to the lush green playing fields of Dublin 4 from the mean streets of the lush green horse-filled playing fields of Kildare was a very impressionable, mixed up and headstrong lad.
“Both of my sisters had gone to UCD, lived on campus and had a great time despite their ‘nerdiness’, as I saw it. Both Maeve and Caragh were high achievers and I lived in their shadow. I felt like I could never live up to their insane academic achievements, so I had nearly accepted I would not excel at the books in UCD. On the one hand that was a mistake, but on the other hand it opened me up to what would eventually be the thing I do for a living and to meeting my eventual wife, Tina.
"Like most people, it took me a good month to settle into life in the sprawling Dutch Gold-fuelled metropolis of Belfield. It would have been great to have a Chris O'Dowd in Moone Boy on my shoulder advising me how to recognise things that were not for me, and members of the Commerce & Economics society, who only wanted me to join so they get their hands on one of my shiny silver punts.
“I was very low on cash and not in the fun ‘I spent all my money on beer’ kind of way. I had about £25 a week to live on and that had to pay for the Silver Dawn bus back to Kildare on a Friday.
“I got a job designing posters and got a few quid from my sister to make ends meet, because being too poor to eat can get you down, particularly when you’re surrounded by Ross O’Carroll-Kelly types in the student bar who ‘couldn’t give a fock’. Were it not for my low tolerance for alcohol and the Fosters Dollars System (buy three pints, get a fourth free) I have no idea how I could have gotten drunk back then.
“I struggled academically in first year. Coming from the spoon-feed-and-regurgitate method of learning we get in secondary school, I found it really hard to get my head around three things. First, none of the academic staff cared if you didn’t do the work; it was totally up to you. Second, you were expected to write essays where you argued for a theory you put forward and believed in. And finally, I had more free time than I’d had since I was four years old.
"Those three things combined are why so many people used to drop out of arts in UCD. If I could go back like Biff in Back To The Future, I wouldn't grab the old me by the lapels and give me the exam papers for all three years of my course. I'd probably try to help the old me make sense of these three things, give me some money and a few tips for the horses.
“On January 17th, 2000, I met the love of my life in UCD student bar. About the same time I started getting up in front of lecture theatres and trying to make them laugh at the Literary & Historical Society debates. Both of those things changed my life forever and neither would have happened if I’d listened to the advice of others.
“I never found university easy. At lot of the time it wasn’t fun the way people said it would be, and that’s probably how I got so much out of it. But nobody could tell you that back then and nor should they.”
