You hear so much about what to expect when you're at Uni, but nothing can really prepare you for what you will experience at all, and everyone experiences Uni differently. So based on my own first year, I've made a short guide about all the things I wish someone had told me about Uni, complete with shamefully embarrassing anecdotes. But truth be told, it has been the best and strangest experience of my life.
- You will miss home to begin with and feel like a bit of a twat for it. It's natural. Everyone feels like this a bit at the start, after all you've put up with your family around you for the whole of your life up until this moment, so it will feel strange not to see them for a while. Just don't do what I did, which was phone home after 3 days crying about how much I hated it and wanted to go home. It's safe to say I'd concerned my mother a bit too much and she spent the rest of the year worrying and calling me. Totally not the smoothest move.
- Promising yourself you'll do all the extra reading and work for lectures, but you won't. It's not that you don't love your course, and that you aren't committed, but who seriously has time to read all the PDF's and highlight all the handouts they give you? There's far too much important stuff to do instead, like sleeping and watching netflix, that sometimes there simply isn't enough time for studying. Some of my friends on my course and I had a little system where we used to read one each, then explain them to each other at the start of the lecture, so it looked like we all knew what we were talking about. Sneaky. (I'm not endorsing this at all!) But quite a lot of the time, I genuinely had no idea what I was doing or what was going on in some of my lectures. The moral of the story is, doing the work is probably important if you want to pass.
- You will be ridiculously poor, but budgeting will go out the window. You've only got £200 to last you for 3 months, so naturally you have to go shopping and buy that £40 handbag you've been eyeing up for a while. Who cares if in 2 weeks time you'll be living off of super noodles? You will look fabulous doing it. Honestly, I got through my student finance pretty quickly, and it probably didn't help that I went to Uni in one of the most expensive parts of the UK. So I turned to my overdraft, and ended up living like a queen. I'll probably regret this a lot sooner than I thought, but hey, at least I had a pretty decent year to show for it.
- You will end up getting ludicrously drunk and embarrassing yourself. I ended up drunk and crying in an alleyway, which was probably not the smoothest moment in my life. However everyone has some kind of embarrassing drunken anecdote from their first year of uni, I just happen to have several. My flatmates have some great ones too, such as crawling down the corridor after a wild night out, or being sick all over someone else's bed. But for me, crawling around on the floor crying in an alleyway all because I had left a really cringey voicemail and thrown my phone was probably not the best way to conclude my first semester, but c'est la vie.
- Also, drunken selfies are a thing. You will have more drunken pictures of yourself than anything else on your phone by the end of the year. These will make you laugh and cry about how much of a drunken idiot you really are. Here are a few of my favourites from the last year. (I stole the hat from someone, I'm not really sure why...)
- Fancy dress on a student night out is a big deal. You may think you will look like a complete idiot turning up dressed as a pirate, but you will feel a whole lot weirder when you realise you are the only person there not in fancy dress. My advice to you is to invest in a load of fancy dress bits, like school ties and fairy wings. Perhaps the best fancy dress I've seen this year is a group of people dressed up as Pac-Man and the Ghosts, who spent the whole night chasing each other around the Student Union bar. Absolutely brilliant.
- You will have to learn how to tolerate people. Unfortunately, when you go into halls, you don't get to choose who you live with. If you're lucky like I was, you will end up living with some pretty decent people, but you will find everyone has habits you'll just have to put up with. There will be that one person who never washes anything up and leaves the sink full of all their dirty dishes. Or maybe someone will have all their friends round until ungodly hours of the morning, chatting and playing music when you have a 9am lecture the next morning. And there will most definitely be the one person who doesn't seem to grasp the concept of cleaning up after themselves, and constantly leaves the flat in the worst state known to mankind. It will all drive you completely crazy, but you have to realise that you probably do something which does their heads in just as much. It's all about tolerance, people.
- If you're lucky, you will meet the most amazing people. I ended up meeting some of the greatest people in my life. Some I met because we were living together, others because we're on the same course, and some I met through other people, but they're all equally spectacular. (This is really soppy, I do apologise) But my point is, Uni will change your life whether you expect it to or not, and I certainly had no idea how much my life would change after only one year.
Much love ♥
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