First year at university is always exciting, but it can also be stressful. Here’s a list of 21 things I wish I knew as a fresher at Warwick! They are great tips. Keep reading for 21 things I wish I had known before I was a fresher at Warwick to be as informed as possible!
Check the emails your university has been sending you and get yourself into all the Facebook groups you belong to! It’s a great way to see the sort of people you will be meeting and also have all the notifications about the upcoming events in one very accessible and convenient place!
Make sure you have set up a student bank account! Don’t leave it too late and make sure it is completely set up and ready for when you start university! It is very important and an account specifically designed for students will be the best choice for most of you!
The most important part of your first day is claiming your kitchen cupboard and your shelf in the fridge! Get there early to make sure you have first choice and prime location, and choose wisely because you’ll most likely have these spaces for the rest of the year! GOOD LUCK!
There will be a few fairs during the first few weeks and make sure you check them all out! They are great events to have a quick walk through because most of the opportunities open to you will be advertised here; you never know what may take your fancy! Also, these fairs are packed with freebies, so be ready to pick up enough pens to last you all year!
Print some photos or get some posters of your favourite band, maybe even hang up some fairy lights! Make your room a place where you want to spend your time for the year, and unpack everything soon because you won’t have as much free time once the year starts rolling!
If you’re finding it difficult to get along with your flatmates or make course mates, joining a society is for sure a great way to make loads of friends with similar interests to you! Also, joining a society is a great way to experience a completely different side of university life!
Everyone is in the same situation, so don’t be scared to say hi to new people you meet. Get to know the people you are living with or spark a conversation with someone sitting next to you before a lecture; a lot of people end up sticking with the friends they make in the first few weeks so get to know as many people as you can!
When all you’re doing is going out, it can’t be too difficult to spend your entire loan for first term within the first two weeks. Be a bit sensible and learn to be responsible for your budgeting, but also, don’t worry too much, because they will be the most expensive two weeks of the year; the rest of the year will not be as intense.
As a student, you won’t have an hour and a half each night to prepare a Michelin standard three course meal, so don’t worry too much if you’re eating pesto-pasta every night of second term. You’ll find other things to worry about aside from nutrition, but try and get some fruit and veg in there somewhere!
Be that between lectures or before dinner, naps are definitely a thing at university! Make time to relax and do what you enjoy doing. You won’t be able to concentrate or get involved with activities if you are constantly tired so make sure you get enough rest!
One thing students are most definitely guilty of is consuming an outrageous amount of alcohol! It’s a good idea to have something to eat before drinking and drinking plenty of water, especially when you come back from a night out! It will save you from feeling really bad the next day, and you may even make that 9AM!
If your flat/kitchen is a constant mess, try and do something about it. Talk to your other flatmates and decide on the best approach to sorting it out, because you will have to do so eventually! The best way is most likely going to be creating a rota and taking it in turns to do different jobs. Just stick it on the fridge and most people would be willing to help out; it will also make everyone think more about cleaning up after themselves!
Fresher’s Flu is real, it will find you and it WILL get you, so get all the defences out, ready, and prepare to FIGHT!
If you try to write down everything your lecturer says, you’ll have twelve and a half pages of scribble and you won’t have actually taken in anything they’ve said. Try to listen to what your lecturer has to say, and then try and make your own notes from them. Be brief, but not so brief that you don’t understand your notes later.
There is absolutely no point in making killer lecture notes if you’re not going to look after them! Keep them together, be that in one notebook or in a folder, just don’t leave them around thinking you will deal with them later. It takes very little time to put your notes safely away at the end of each day and it will save you a lot of time and stress at the end of term when you have accumulated a pile of notes on your desk from a mix of all 6 modules with a fraction of them having gone missing!
Lectures are there to help you. You may feel like they are not, and okay, maybe sometimes you really didn’t need to be there, but skipping lectures can be seen as being “addictive”, as you are suddenly in control of another part of your life, and that is your attendance! Skipping a lecture once in a while may not be too hard to catch up on, but if you constantly have to catch up on missed lectures, you are going to fall behind and you are just making it more difficult for yourself. Also, you are not going to learn as well trying to learn from someone else’s notes.
You’re not in year 8 anymore so behave like an adult and treat your deadlines seriously. You will lose respect within your department very fast if you’re that kid who never hands in his assignments. At the end of this you want to have a great qualification, so do the work you need to do! It will make revision for exams a lot easier if you’ve been keeping on top of work throughout the year and completing assignments are a way to make sure you are doing just that! If you want to go out Wednesday night and you have a deadline Thursday morning, get the work done before! Take control of your time and deadlines shouldn’t be too much of a problem for you!
Don’t feel like your tutors are unapproachable! They have been given to you in order to help you do as well as you can at your time in the university so let them help you and be sure to let them know if there is anything you are struggling with, be that degree related work, family, social or health matters, anything that is affecting your ability to perform at your best, let them know and they will always aid you in the direction that will best support you! Don’t feel that you need to hide any personal problems you are going through, because all departments will take how extracurricular matters are influencing your academic performance into consideration.
The transition into university doesn’t go smoothly for everyone, in fact, a lot of students find term one of their first year the hardest with regards to starting somewhere completely new, not being sure if they fit in, and other settling in issues. It isn’t uncommon so if you feel unhappy, or scared, you are not alone and there will be plenty of support in place for you at your university that you should not be afraid of approaching! I can assure you, once you’ve survived first term, the rest follows smoothly!
Too many students go to university thinking they can start afresh and become someone completely new, but in the end, you’re the only one who will hate who you have tried to make yourself become. Try and be as you as you can and avoid future regrets!
Stop worrying about the stresses of university and try and just enjoy being in your first year, after all, YOU’RE ONLY FRESH ONCE!
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