What they didn’t tell you about being a fresher

Welcome to the best three years of your life

Freshers’ Week will be the most disheartening week of your life

Think small talk. Think lots of small talk. Think so much small talk that you would rather hurl that person’s Jagerbomb at them than tell the eighty billionth student of the night where you’re from and what degree you’re doing.

Freshers’ Week has essentially turned into an entrepreneurial wet dream for clubs. Students put money behind the bar in a desperate attempt to drink through the inane chat. The result: Au reviour massive chunk of student loan.

You’ll hate your flat mates

Surely, statistically, on the grounds of probability alone, one of your flatmates will be friendship material? Think the fuck again.

Living in halls is like being on Big Brother only you don’t have the consolation of being eliminated. If you’re lucky, your flatmates are “very sweet” but you just have, you know, “nothing in common with them.”

Or if you’re unlucky, you face a year of residing with the strangest of humankind who make you dread venturing from your room to check on your oven pizza. Fresher Lesson Number One: the world is full of bizarre people.

Have you met my new flat mate?

Contrary to popular belief, you do have to work in first year

Second years are in love with the condescending catchphrase, “But it doesn’t count!” whenever addressing you. True. But you still have to work. Even if you’re just aiming to “scrape that 40%” – which freshers love to remind each other is their pivotal aim in life – you can still only achieve this by stringing together sentences which are vaguely relevant to the course content in your essays and exams.

I swear when I was having a gap yah, everyone at uni’s Snapchat stories were just one long array of pres. Those lack of library pics were really misleading: cheers, guys.

Productive library sesh

Seminars, to put it oh so lightly, are an uncomfortable experience

Welcome to first year seminars, where everyone hasn’t done the reading so no one has anything to say. If you find yourself speaking just to fill the excruciatingly awkward silences, bear in mind the tutor, desperate for some form of intellectual conversation to arise from the ashes of the constant coughing (seriously, all people in seminars do is cough…), will ask you to expand on whatever nonsensical piece of word vomit has left your mind. That’s when it gets even more awkward. Enjoy: that cost you approximately sixty quid.

Working out who to live with in second year is hard

Deciding on living arrangements for second year resembles one of George RR Martin’s more unsettling chapters. In other words, forget student unions, protests and FemSoc, the most political part of university is sorting out your second year house.

Admit it, the prospect of who you’re going to live with come second year occupies the back of your minds right from the very beginning. It’s there when you firm that offer. It’s there during Freshers week. It’s there when you make your first friend (could you see yourself living with them?) Then, suddenly, it’s crunch time.

Whether it’s the stress of splitting too big a group into smaller houses, deciding between multiple house invitations or ending up without anywhere to live at all, everyone experiences their fair share of turbulence. I know I’m excited to relive all that next January…

Just thinking about my house

Everyone LOVES talking about being a fresher

Forget Gogglebox, the Ket drought and Isis, freshers seem far more enthralled by animated discussions of ranging Tequila shot prices between Northern and Southern unis and the gaping flaws in the student loan system. Maybe it’s the lack of contact hours.

Maybe it’s the lack of money. But no one told me how much of uni would consist of sitting around in people’s kitchens discussing the concept of uni. It’s literally all we do.