Taking up the task of providing ethnographic insights on one of the main spaces youth inhabit, the educational sector (Adely 2009), the paper discusses the condition of being a university student in contemporary Jordan. Education is central to understanding what choices and dilemmas youth face today, and I argue that the university provides a unique space in which to investigate changing notions of education, citizenship, social and gender roles, religious and friendship ties. The institution legitimize knowledge and its value, regulates access to different faculties and then to different careers in the labor marker, and provides hierarchies of worth to sustain division within society. Students experience contrasting feelings that push them toward different moral projects – personal realization, familial expectations, pressure from peers and from the dominant culture on campus, religious ideals and career plans. Based on eighteen months of ethnographies research between 2003 and 2012 at the University of Jordan, the oldest institution in the country, the paper offers a unique contextualization of students’ subjectivities within the university as an institution. I focus in particular on students’ modes of socialization, and on how these are induced by the structure of the university, as well as from broader societal distinctions – and increasingly so, thanks to the recent reforms that have fundamentally altered ways of getting into the university. I will concentrate on the differences between the scientific and the humanistic curricula – and the different sets of values attached to both – and how this reflects on differences among the students enrolled in these curricula, differences among the more and the less privileged faculties. The paper finally analyses how Jordanian students wait out their university years, trying to find their ways in a political context that is heavily shaped by a number of crisis in almost all neighboring countries, which have heavy consequences in Jordan. Among students feelings of boredom, and fears of waithood, abound but within a notion of normalcy, of the endurance necessary to successfully wait out this liminal condition.