How Manchester shaped me

Four years here made Manchester my second home. Before anything else, thank you, to this city and the people in it, for all the kindness and all the good these years gave me. I’ll always miss the red brick, the constant drizzle, and the way the sky glowed purple at night, and I’ll always carry the view down Oxford Road in my head.Oxford Road runs straight through the university, lined with the buildings I walked past every day.

The things that shaped me most happened outside the lecture hall. These are the ones I’m taking with me.

Critical thinking

Manchester taught me to think for myself. I slowed down before accepting a claim, and started asking what it rests on, who benefits from it, and what it leaves out. Picking an argument apart was encouraged, even when it came from someone senior. Disagreeing well, and backing it up with reasons, was treated as a skill worth having. I also came to value plain language, the kind a ten-year-old could follow. An idea that can only be said in complicated words is often one that someone would rather you didn’t look at too closely.

Informed consent

Here are two words I’d never really used before: informed consent. Informed means I have the facts. Consent means the decision is mine to give or refuse. I first saw it as a box to tick on a form, and then I started noticing it everywhere, a whole culture in the habit of asking before it acts on you. Having a clear word for something turns out to be most of being able to ask for it. There’s a line from Wittgenstein I only understood once I’d lived in a second language: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Learning English widened mine.

Boundaries

Saying no, I found out, is allowed. It sounds obvious written down, but it took me most of a year to believe it. The calm option, turning something down plainly and without drama, was just how people spoke to each other here.A response tends to fall into one of four modes: passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, or assertive. The calm, plain one is assertiveness, and it was the one I had no name or model for until here. You can just say “I can’t take that on this week,” and people accept it and move on. My time and energy were mine to spend. Turning something down didn’t make me a worse friend or a worse student, and most of the time nobody even asked me to explain.

Passion

Frisbee taught me how it feels to be completely inside something, with no eye on the score. The joy lived in the playing, and once I felt that, winning and losing stopped being the point. You can love a thing for itself, and the loving asks for nothing back.

AI turned out to be that kind of love. Worn out on a stuck project, I heard my supervisor Goran make an easy, passing remark: “If it already tires you now, how are you going to spend the next thirty or forty years on it?” I have turned the question over many times since. There is work you love and work you only happen to do well, and I needed to know which one AI was for me. Each time I weigh it, I come away surer of where I stand: even the dead ends are where I most want to be. The passion came first and the work grew from it, which I think is the only order that lasts.

Wellbeing

What struck me first was how seriously the place took wellbeing at all. Back home, looking after yourself was something you got to once the real work was done, if any time was left over. Here it sat underneath everything else: sleep, food, exercise, rest, and your state of mind, treated as the base the rest of life is built on. Rest was part of doing good work, and no one made you feel soft for taking it. Wellbeing, I came to understand, is all of those things held together at once, and you cannot run any one of them into the red for long before the others begin to give. I’m leaving able to look after myself, body and head, and fairly sure the care is worth it.

Diversity

Manchester was my first real encounter with diversity: people whose lives, beliefs, and ways of seeing were nothing like the ones I grew up with. In a single seminar or a shared kitchen you’d find a dozen countries, a spread of faiths, clashing politics, every kind of way of loving and living, and none of it was treated as strange. Difference was just the normal texture of the place. Being around it made my own assumptions visible: a lot of what I’d taken as universal turned out to be one local way among many. It taught me that you can disagree with someone, or simply not understand them yet, and still share a table and a city. I left with a much bigger sense of how many ways there are to be a person.

Inspire, and be inspired

The poet Lemn Sissay wrote a poem to commemorate his installation as Chancellor of the University of Manchester: inspire, and be inspired. For four years I was the one being inspired. Everything above was a form of it: people who argued well, who asked before they acted, who rested without apology, who lived differently and were easy about it. What I would like now is to pass it on, to inspire someone else the way Manchester inspired me.

See you later, Manchester

I’ll leave as gently as I came,
and gently I’ll wave goodbye,
flicking my wrist as I turn to go,
leaving each cloud in the sky.

— Xu Zhimo, “Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again”

Only now, as I leave, do I truly understand them. Thanks for everything. See you later, Manchester.