I did well enough academically at school to be able to choose my University course. In retrospect I'm not sure why I chose Medicine. It may have been something to do with wanting to find some use for six years of Latin, or just not liking the idea of Law or Science degrees as much. I certainly had no idea what University and Medicine would involve.

I started in a residential college, Trinity, at the same time as starting Medicine at the University of Melbourne. The choice of Trinity was partly because my father had gone there and partly because quite a few guys from my school were going there. If I had taken a closer look at which guys from school were going there I probably would have chosen Queens College instead.

While I did have friends at Trinity and several of them are still good friends today, I felt much more of an outsider there than I ever had at school. The culture at Trinity at the time was very sport and alcohol based which left me quite marginalized, especially as I felt uncomfortable going to the pub at 17 (the legal drinking age in Australia is 18) and by the time I had tuned 18 I had failed to establish familiarity with the popular pubs nearby.

It's easy in retrospect to see the failings of Trinity, and I don't have much affection for the place, unlike school. However my unhappiness there was probably driven as much by being uncomfortable with myself and determinedly not dealing with my sexuality as by the lack of vision or leadership from those running the college.

I stayed at Trinity for three years (1988-90) and I'm grateful for having met some good people there: Jen, Kate, Sarah & David, Sue and a few others. By the end of 1989 I was sick of the place and quite unhappy; I'm surprised I lasted another year there.