Hark, what is that? The sound of a thousands of first year university students receiving their email login details and finding out their timetables? Lo, but it is. Fresher’s week is around the corner, and after folk on Patreon suggested it might be fun for me to write about uni life or studying, I thought I’d put a little guide together for those of you who are preparing to start your degree about what you might benefit from taking (or not). My credentials, if you are new: I went to university aged 26 and I’m about to start the third year of my bachelor’s, so I a) did not give a shit about fresher’s week boozing, b) did give a shit about my course, and c) no longer cared what people thought of me beyond generalised settling-in anxiety, so did not feel pressure to conform to Traditional Uni Activities. In the UK these seem to be mostly drinking til you puke, pulling all night study sessions a day before a deadline and spending your loan by mid-November. And I am not here to tell you not to do that! I’m not going to tell you to do that either. Your life is your own, my loves. I am too busy with mine to pay attention to yours, let alone judge it from a high castle of moral superiority. Also, had I gone to university at 18, I’d have crumpled under peer pressure on day one. This list is for the me of two years ago, who did a lot of research but didn’t quite take all the right things, but also for the me of nine years ago.

Things you don’t need:

• A lorry’s worth of clothing, kitchen equipment or furnishings. You won’t have space for more than a handful of each thing, because photos of your accommodation, whether it’s private or halls of residence, make the rooms look huge. Your room will not be huge. It will probably be very ugly. Take the basics and you can pop out to a charity shop or ambiguous budget homeware store for anything extra. Take a new flatmate with you! Explore your new town!
• A packed fresher’s week calendar. In fact you should probably schedule in blocks of time for low key socials (my uni is big on nature walks, colouring sessions and anything to do with hedgehogs). I can also recommend blocking out time for doing nothing social whatsoever. You will meet 284742 people in fresher’s week. This is fine. Do not expect to remember, like or even moderately connect with more than three of them. I have made three close friends in my two years – one friend I met during fresher’s then didn’t see for ages, one friend lived in my flat on campus so we initially hung out by necessity of proximity, the third wasn’t even at uni in my first year. If you’re going to focus on connecting with anyone, prioritise your lecturers and faculty because you will definitely need to know who they are.

Things that are helpful to have:

• A decent grasp of how you study. I didn’t have a clue how best I learn until I did my Access to Higher Education Diploma when I was 25 and for the first time had a small timetable that I could muddle through slowly and figure out how I like to work. We were also in and out of lockdown, so for the first time ever, studying became a welcome distraction from the rest of the world. My first year of university helped me hone my understanding of my brain, and second year even more so, but I could have saved a bit of time if I’d sat down before first semester of first year and thought about how I like to learn – not how I thought I should learn. Devastatingly, I am not someone who can write in calligraphy and paste magazine cut-outs into a notebook. I am someone who enjoys highlighters and working in twenty minute chunks. Have a think about what works for you and how you might apply it in a lecture, seminar or a lab setting.

Pausing the list a moment to say that this is in the ‘helpful to have’ section because if you aren’t sure how you learn – if you finished A Levels or college and blinked down at your results with no idea how you reached them, whether they were ‘good’ grades or ‘bad’ grades: I did too and it is absolutely fine. I’d argue that in a school system that prioritises finding correct answers over learning how to think, it’s inevitable, but that’s a discussion for another day. Here is something else I would have benefited from hearing in the dark days of A Levels when I was told by well meaning adults in no uncertain terms that a degree from a Russell Group university was the only way to get anywhere: learning is hard and often, with the best will in the world, you would rather be anywhere than in a classroom. This is also fine. I’m going to type it twice, in case you don’t believe me. It is fine to not want to go to university, even if you just got your A Level results and your family is buying you new towels to take to your new home. There is time to put the breaks on. Take a gap year if you need to. Take five or ten or twenty years if you need to. Anyone who tells you that you need a degree, and that you need it as soon as you leave school is, as Lorde says in Green Light, a damn liar. You can tell them I told you to tell them that.

While we’re on the subject of brains: if you think you might have a learning difference or neurodivergence, I can highly recommend requesting support via your school or university. It’ll be quicker than going through your GP independently, and your university most likely has support or resources available as well. Maybe don’t go to uni just for the referral, though, that would be like setting fire to a bookshop because you didn’t like how the last series of Good Omens ended.

Things you definitely need:

• The phone number of your university’s security team. You won’t need it until you really, really need it.
• A budget. Yeah, yeah, I’m ancient. Make one anyway, and review it regularly. List your rent, any utilities (find out if you need to buy contents insurance for where you live!), your estimated food bill and your estimated funsies budget for the coming academic year. Take a look at your incoming money, like your loans or any part time work, and crunch the numbers to see if there’s a shortfall or (hopefully!) money left over for more funsies. Definitely include a column in your budget called ‘funsies’ because university isn’t meant to be the 21st century equivalent of sitting in a cellar squinting at old books by candle light. Your uni town or city will host cool shit, even if it isn’t the traditional sort of fresher’s week cool shit. In my first months in Uni City, I took myself to a book signing, did a ghost tour walk with a society and went to a haunted house experience with my flatmates. I consumed maybe two cocktails between September and Christmas, and went to zero club nights (if I ever go clubbing again, they’re going to have to have a gurney on standby for when the relative youth of the punters overwhelms me. Or if the music’s so shit I collapse from second hand embarrassment).

• A small but strong network of people, including people paid to look out for you. Like I said, you’ll find your friends in your own time. Regardless, the first semester of first year feels emotionally a bit like you’ve been thrown into the Atlantic Ocean in a dinghy with a broken oar. So. Pre-existing mates! They don’t have to be local. Make a list of people you can talk to, and make the effort to stay in touch. Overwhelm is inevitable when you have clusters of deadlines, your flatmates won’t do their washing up and it costs five quid to buy a cup of tea. Also the planet is burning and your postgraduate options are depleted by the economic downturn and you just want a job that doesn’t exacerbate any of your health issues. If someone tells you they sailed through their degree they are – say it with me – a damn liar. Check in with your friends. Schedule time to video call or study together or hang out talking shite. Save the details of your university’s pastoral/wellbeing services. Request to use the services when you’re having a fifty percent mental health day, because they will have a waiting list and if you schedule an appointment when you’re having a fifty percent day, you’ll see them before you hit a ten percent day.
• An academic access plan, if you need one. It might not be called an academic access plan – I only know the terms for my uni. If you’ve got a chronic health condition, disability or learning difference (or all three, gosh, I wonder what that might be like) you should have some sort of paperwork detailing what teachers need to know about your condition and any adjustments you might need in class. For example, my joints don’t respond well to sitting down for longer than about an hour, so if I don’t stand up to stretch and move about, one of my knees is liable to buckle and one wrist will become too painful to write. My teachers know about my joint disorder, because they have my academic access plan, and so they know to call a break once an hour or so. My faculty is excellent, so teaching staff read plans and generally aim for their students to have a pleasant experience – I also email my teachers every semester, reminding them about my plan and clarifying that if they don’t call a break, I’ll take one anyway. Health before wealth, as they say, or in this case health before sitting politely when you need to stretch.

And that is it. I’m aware most of those suggestions were intangible, or involved a spreadsheet, and your experience is not my experience and thus you might find ninety-eight percent of what I’ve suggested waffle. If you’ve been through the university system already and have other suggestions, share them in the comments. If you’re about to start or return to studying and have questions, ask them! Hive mind and whatnot. I’m off to stare at a stack of pre-semester reading and wonder how many snacks I will need before the reading is complete. There must be an equation, somewhere. Page length multiplied by attention span, minus the number of hours you’ve already been awake.

Look after yourselves!
Francesca

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