New jobs dig up long-buried feelings. A whiff of first-day-of-school-ness. Not the gloss of chummy moments, but the real thing. Memories in matte. The sour bite of nerves. The neck scratch of a stiff collar and recently bought jumper. Pencil shavings jostling with ammonia-clean corridors. I know this because I’m the new kid. I’ve just started at VML as ECD, which sounds like a lovely collection of letters until you realise you don’t even have an access pass yet, and need to be collected from reception like a child from the school gates.

The similarities are clear. There are hundreds of people to meet. Hundreds of names and handshakes. Should it be a hug? A fist-bump? Something awkward in between? A conveyor belt of smiles you’ll never remember in the right order. Get one wrong and you’re back in year seven calling the teacher ‘mum’ instead of ‘miss’. Mortifying.

The thing you have to pick up quickly is the new lingo, like the local dialect of a new school. Otherwise, you’re otherised. Those acronyms on every brand stacked like chairs in the back room of the school hall. Shorthand that isn’t short at all, a slang of syllables that sound like they ought to mean something. You nod, you scribble something in your notebook, an impromptu test before you’ve even had a chance to swot.

Real education doesn’t happen in the classroom. Did it ever? It happens at breaktime. At the new job, there are fewer swapped sandwiches, but over cold pints at the pub and colder Pret baguettes, there’s warmth in the swapped stories, the “Oh you used to work at Blah-di-Blah? So you must know Name Surname! I used to be on the YaddaYadda account with Name Surname back when we were juniors at ABCD.” In meetings, you see the corporate mask, but at lunch and over drinks, you get to know the person. Armour unwraps in canteen queues for chicken wraps.

Fresh perspective is the accidental gift of the new kid. You notice the teachers. You compare them to the ones at your old school. Better in some ways, less so in others. At work, you see the processes, the rituals, the peculiar choreography of meetings and emails. When you’re not yet part of the line dance, you can spot who’s out of step. Later, you’ll forget to notice, but at the start, it’s as clear as chalk dust in the air.

An inescapable fact of life is that exams never really die. They reincarnate as pitches. The same swollen nights, the same sickly adrenaline, the same study groups bent over highlighted text and Post-It notes that might, if recited in the right order, earn you a gold star and top marks. The sense of relief afterwards is deeply familiar too. The sugar crash of tension spent, the quiet bond of a group that’s been through the trenches of the timetable together.

Through it all, there is the exquisite discomfort of not quite belonging yet. A slight, constant off-balance that demands you be on your toes. That unease is the sharpest edge you’ll ever have. Because the new kid sees everything. The new kid can ask the questions everyone else stopped asking when they slipped on their puffer jacket of comfort and familiarity.

If you’re not starting anywhere new this September, make yourself new. Changing desks can change your perspective. Sit with strangers at lunch. Volunteer for the brief nobody wants. Become the unpolished person in the over-polished first-day shoes. You will scrape your work persona. You will singe your synapses. You will learn. And that’s the entire point.