Almost everyone who goes to university describes some version of “finding themselves” there — trying on a new way of thinking, talking, dressing, arguing, being. It can also, at the same time, feel a bit up itself: the gowns, the Latin, the sense of occasion attached to things that would seem perfectly ordinary anywhere else. The honest answer to what’s actually happening is more structural, and less mystical, than either version of the phrase suggests.
An old idea about what institutions do to identity
The sociologist Erving Goffman, in his 1961 study Asylums, described a category of institution he called “total” — places that isolate people from ordinary life for a sustained period and put them through a shared, formally organised existence with its own rules, rhythms, and rituals. His examples were not limited to the psychiatric hospitals his research centred on; he explicitly included army training camps, monasteries, and boarding schools in the same category. What all of these share, in Goffman’s account, is a process of stripping away the identity a person arrived with — the everyday supports, routines, and social roles that made that identity feel stable — and replacing it with a new one, built entirely on the institution’s own terms.
A residential university is not a total institution in the strict sense Goffman meant. Students are not confined, can leave at will, and keep real contact with the outside world throughout. But the underlying mechanism he described — arrive as one kind of person, be placed inside a shared, deliberately organised environment with its own dress, language, and rituals, and leave having absorbed a new sense of who you are — operates in a lighter, more voluntary version at university, and this is very plausibly what “finding yourself” is actually describing. It is also, not coincidentally, close to what happens in the other institution most associated with the same phrase: army basic training, where a civilian identity is deliberately dismantled and rebuilt around a new set of shared codes, in a more intensive, less voluntary version of the same underlying process.
What gets picked up along the way
Neither institution hands over a neutral identity. Both come with their own inherited mythology, symbol, and ritual, and part of “finding yourself” inside either one is absorbing that mythology as though it were simply how things are, rather than a particular institution’s chosen self-image. A university’s version of this is a specific, recognisable culture of pomposity: lofty Latin terminology deployed in everyday institutional life, professors housed in residence like minor nobility, formal gowns for ceremonies that could just as easily happen in ordinary dress, and honorary doctorates handed to celebrities more for the reflected prestige than any scholarly connection. It shows up, too, in a more general tendency — of institutions and students alike — to box above their actual weight: to speak and present as though everything happening here carries more historical and intellectual significance than the equivalent thing would carry anywhere else.
This culture divides people cleanly, and the division is real enough to have been measured. The 93% Club’s Big State School Survey found that nearly three-quarters of state-educated students report culture shock on arriving at university, rising to 91% among those from working-class backgrounds specifically — and 94% of students, across the board, believe university culture is naturally built to suit the wealthy rather than being neutral ground everyone enters equally (The 93% Club, 2025). Some students find the pomp genuinely energising — it is part of what they came for, a sense of occasion and significance that makes the effort feel worthwhile. Others find it alienating, even faintly absurd, a costume they are expected to wear without ever being told why, or whose real purpose is separate from what it claims to be doing. Neither reaction is wrong. What matters is recognising the pomposity as a deliberate cultural feature rather than an incidental one, and noticing, honestly, which side of that divide a person actually falls on rather than assuming enjoyment or discomfort is required.
This platform has explored a related question elsewhere, in a different context (“Why Delusions of Grandeur?”): that essay traces how a mind convinces itself of exceptional significance, and closes by examining Michael Young’s 1958 concept of meritocracy — the promise that a level field, tested purely by ability and effort, explains who ends up where. The essay’s argument there is that visible successes obscure a far larger, invisible field of ordinary outcomes, a mismatch that leaves room for grandiosity to grow. A related mismatch is worth noticing here, in a gentler and entirely institutional form: every university, whatever its actual age, is performing a chosen self-image, and a student absorbing that performance experiences the same psychological process regardless of how old the ceremony genuinely is. At Oxford, Cambridge, or St Andrews, the gowns, Latin, and ceremony sit on top of a genuinely old, continuous institutional history. At many other universities, the same symbolic furniture has been adopted more recently. Neither is dishonest, and neither makes the experience of absorbing it any less real for the student going through it — an old performance and a new one still ask the same thing of the person inside them. Whether that performance actually converts into equal reward later on is a separate, harder question, taken up elsewhere on this platform (“Britain’s Quiet Caste That Resists Meritocracy”).
It is also not a simple story of who pushes back against the pomp and who embraces it. Some of the sharpest mockery of institutional grandeur comes from students at the most established end of the cohort — those secure enough in their own status to find the ceremony faintly ridiculous rather than something they need. Rejecting the pomp can be its own form of belonging, available more easily to those who were never going to be judged by whether they took it seriously in the first place.
Liberating and demanding, at the same time
None of this makes the experience less real or less valuable. A genuine reorganisation of identity — new ways of arguing, thinking, and belonging — is exactly what people mean when they say university changed them, and for many people that change is welcome, even overdue. But it is also, on Goffman’s terms, a demanding process, not a purely gentle one: identities do not get rebuilt without the old one being loosened first, and that loosening can be disorientating even when the destination is good. The forces parallel is worth holding onto here, not because university is remotely as intense or as involuntary as basic training, but because both point to the same underlying truth: an institution that reshapes a person’s sense of self is doing something significant to them, whatever costume of ceremony and tradition it dresses that process in.
What this is not
None of this is a case against the value of what a residential university offers, or a claim that the older institutions’ history makes their grandeur more deserved in some moral sense. It is an invitation to notice the process itself — to recognise “finding yourself” as a real, structural thing institutions do to people, deliberately and by design, and to hold that recognition alongside whatever ceremony, myth, or self-importance the specific institution wraps around it. University can feel a bit up itself. Knowing why is most of what takes the sting out of it.
Topics: #InOtherWords #UniversityLife #IdentityFormation #Goffman #TotalInstitutions #Meritocracy #StudentExperience
Related YFL Content
Why Delusions of Grandeur? — the essay this piece borrows its meritocracy thread from, tracing how a mind convinces itself of exceptional significance.
Britain's Quiet Caste That Resists Meritocracy — whether the performance discussed here actually converts into equal reward later on, examined in full.
Academia and the Marketplace — the institutional pressures universities are under while performing the self-image this essay describes.
The Drop-off at Uni — the same transition into a new institutional identity, from the emotional side rather than the structural one.