Freshers’ week offers the ultimate chance to reinvent yourself. Maybe you’ll learn how to be cool, or hone a quirky hobby. The trouble is, it seldom goes to plan.
My personal reinvention involved shaking off my adolescent nickname – Piggy. I was going to start afresh: people would use my real name.
Within 48 hours of arriving at my new home, I was in quarantine with swine flu. For the next week I was kept in my room, provided with face masks, disinfectant, and what every girl wants during freshers: a “Do Not Enter” sign for my door.
Fortunately, I recovered well enough and eventually even got used to being referred to as “pig-flu girl”. I mean, at least it was (slightly) different.
I got off lightly. In the grand scheme of miserable freshers’ weeks, there are far greater depths to which you can plummet. Amelia Smith’s first week at the University of Cambridge started out at the low end of average – “I missed my boyfriend and my room was so tiny I just cried a lot” – and then rapidly deteriorated; “the next day, I got so drunk on a pub crawl that I jumped on to a spiked fence, which pierced my shoe and foot. And then I peed behind a bin outside a club.”
Impaling your foot is apparently very painful – something to do with nerve endings. Freshers’ injuries aren’t uncommon and mean there’s always someone who ends up spending the first few weeks of term on crutches. Be nice to them.
However, even if you’re on crutches when you get lost on the way to your first lecture, the law of the freshers’ universe means there’s always someone having a worse time than you.
Unless, perhaps, you’re Sarah Burbage. She spent her freshers’ week at the University of Birmingham in total agony. “I’d had a great first day, meeting people from my course and halls,” she says.
“Then at 2am my insides started hurting in a way they never had before and I called my mum in tears not knowing what to do. I hurried to register with the GP on Monday, where I was told it was stomach acid and to drink Yakult. I ploughed on through the week but I was struggling to walk at times because of the pain. By 9pm each day, I had to make my excuses and head to bed.”
Things took a turn for the worse, and by Wednesday that week, Burbage was put in a taxi to hospital by her GP and underwent keyhole surgery for suspected appendicitis.
But she offers reassurance to anyone who misses out on the organised fun: “Despite my less than perfect start, I found it easy to make friends and meet people as everyone was so friendly, so it worked out fine and I still managed to settle in.”
If, like Jane Holden, you find yourself up barricaded in your room desperately trying to keep up with work – consider yourself lucky. Different universities have wildly different workloads in the first few weeks, and for Holden, a former student at the University of Oxford, starting university was an academic baptism of fire. “Within two days I had been given two essays and seven days to do them. I often joke that I got a freshers’ 48 hours,” she says.
But for every horror story, there are many more freshers who have a great first week. Harry Jones was one of them. “No one knew me at university, so for the first time I was faced with a chance to meet people without preconceptions. I unconsciously started to behave differently and to be more confident,” he says.
Jones is now a highly successful academic – he liked uni so much he never left.
So try to have a good time during freshers’ week, but if you do find yourself feeling blue, you can always take comfort in the fact that you probably haven’t got appendicitis – and neither of your feet has been impaled on a spike.
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Some names have been changed.
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