Navigating the art of ‘Freshers Freedom’

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The prospect of leaving behind a whole life to begin a new one at university is never easy to swallow. Grinding it down to just a three-hour car journey from your family home to campus can help to digest the process. As a fresh-faced first year, that is how I wanted to view it. The car was absolutely stacked to the brim as my dad and I pulled into halls.

I had done the classic ‘panic-pack’: finding comfort in including every single item of clothing I owned, only for so much to be discarded for the best part of the year. I believe a total of 15+ trips were made from car to elevator, until delirium took the better of us and I called it quits.

In hindsight, embracing the change is the golden opportunity to reinvent yourself and stumble across new habits or hobbies in the process. But if nothing you like is sticking, don’t bother forcing the glue. What I quickly discovered was that people around me were always looking to have fun and be themselves, so there would always be something in common to talk about.

Whilst bonding with another fresher about a mutual curiosity for table tennis during a pub trip, we decided to give it a go the next morning. There is nothing that could have humbled either of us more that week than a simple fresher’s trial session, even with childhoods rooted in hand-eye coordination. I knew my future was never in table tennis but saying yes to things came to be the best way to have fun.

“In hindsight, embracing the change is the golden opportunity to reinvent yourself and stumble across new habits or hobbies in the process”

Of course, arguably the main advantage in the first week or month of university is your newfound freedom. Getting up at midday is considered the norm, along with losing your phone, keys and memory on a night out. Trekking to someone’s house across town to retrieve my flat fob, having been locked out all night, was one of my earliest highlights. The best bits are often the ones you least expect, like tattooing yourself in black pen to find it does not come off the next day, or helping another girl recover from the breakup of a relationship that lasted 48 hours at four o’clock in the morning.

As a fourth year looking back on my first university experiences, I wish I had recorded more of the week to recall random memories with a variety of random people, or with those that became my closest friends. I would also tell myself not to pay £20 for the club ticket that has no venue, because it is indeed a scam.