Freshers week rebellion guide from a retired introvert
There is a peculiar lie we tell people about university.
We tell you that this is your chance to reinvent yourself. Nobody knows you here. Nobody remembers who you were at school, nobody cares about the embarrassing haircut you had at 16 or the Wattpad Twilight fanfiction phase you went through, and nobody has any expectations of you. You can arrive at university and become whoever you want.
It is, theoretically, a beautiful proposition. University is one of the few places in adult life where you are actually allowed to be unfinished. You can discover that you are not the person you thought you were at 18, which is probably fortunate for everyone involved.
The problem is that the moment you arrive, university also seems to hand you a fairly comprehensive instruction manual for what your reinvention is supposed to look like.
Freshers Week is perhaps the only time in your life when you are simultaneously encouraged to stand out and fit in all at the same time.
There is a very specific archetype of the successful fresher: they go out every night, immediately acquire a massive friendship group, join five societies, get invited to parties, appear effortlessly confident, have some sort of romantic encounter with a mysterious and nonchalant hottie, and somehow still attend their 9am lecture the next morning. Some people arrive at university and immediately make friends. I arrived and immediately lost my keys.
We collectively treat this “perfect fresher” person as though they are winning university.
But what if they’re not?
What if we’ve simply confused visibility with happiness?
There is a strange prestige attached to being socially overextended at university. The person whose calendar is full until November is somehow perceived to be making better use of their degree than the person who has one dinner planned and is quite pleased about it. We have somehow decided that the quantity of people you see, societies you join and VK chugging competitions you survive is evidence of the quality of your university experience.
Perhaps this is because social life has become a kind of public performance. The group photograph, the tagged location, the story posted at 2.17am – all of it becomes a tiny piece of evidence in the ongoing construction of the university self.
And the introvert is left looking at this thinking: Is everyone else having a better time than me?
And I think it is important to distinguish between being introverted and being shy. Introversion is not an inability to socialise, nor does it mean you dislike people. An introvert can be perfectly confident, funny, charismatic and genuinely excited to meet new people. It is more about how you respond to social stimulation. You can adore your friends and still need to go home afterwards. You can enjoy a party and still need an evening alone the next day. You can desperately want to meet people without wanting to meet 200 of them simultaneously.
There is something uniquely lonely about being surrounded by people who are all trying not to look lonely. You can stand in a crowded club, surrounded by several hundred people, and still have the peculiar sensation that you have somehow become socially invisible. You can sit in a packed lecture theatre without recognising a single face. You can live with five other people and eat dinner in your room because you haven’t quite worked out how to enter the conversation happening in the kitchen and every time you try, you’re weirdly aware of your own hands and what the hell people tend to do with them when they speak.
The extroverts among us seem to possess some magical ability for making conversation. And when everybody else appears to be effortlessly making friends, it is easy to turn that loneliness, that blame, inward. But sometimes loneliness doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. Sometimes it means you haven’t found the right people yet.
I say this as someone about to embark on her fourth year at Glasgow. My first year social strategy was essentially to stand near people and hope they adopted me in their friend group through osmosis or divine intervention. The people I spent most of my time with in first year aren’t even on my Instagram Close Friends list anymore. They were important to me at the time, and then life moved on.
I met my proper crew at the beginning of third year. Yes. Third.
It took me two entire years of university to meet some of the people I now cannot imagine university without.
In retrospect, the Freshers’ Week panic is funny and unimportant now. We behave as though the friend groups formed during the first seven days are going to constitute the definitive social architecture of the next four years. They aren’t.
Real friendship is rarely as cinematic as Freshers makes it seem.
There is no orchestral score when you meet your future best friend. More likely, you both make the same stupid comment in a seminar and then spend the next six months sending each other increasingly deranged TikToks.
So, do you actually need to reinvent yourself?
Maybe. But you don’t need to do it by Friday.
University is one of the rare environments where your identity can remain provisional. You aren’t expected to arrive as a finished adult; you are there to become one, which is an altogether slower and more chaotic process than Freshers Week would have you believe.
And if your preferred method of socialising does not involve alcohol, deafening music and someone shouting “WHERE ARE YOU FROM?” directly into your ear, Glasgow has thankfully provided alternatives such as chess socials, painting nights, etc. These types of activities offer the useful advantage of giving you something to actually do while you meet people, rather than expecting you to manufacture conversation from thin air.
And if your idea of a successful evening is considerably quieter, there’re meditation groups. Having been to meditation myself, I can confirm that it is a glorious refuge for those of us whose ideal social gathering does not involve somebody attempting to start a chant in a nightclub.
None of these are inherently “introvert events”. That’s important. Introverts don’t need a sanitised version of university. They simply need to be reminded that socialising does not have to mean being socially available at all times.
So, freshers, don’t spend the next week measuring your university experience against somebody else’s Instagram story.
All you really need to do is survive that first week without your family, and without losing your ID, your keys or your dignity. If you’re lucky, you might even make it to that 9am on Monday. (And if you do accidentally make a friend, remember to immediately panic about whether you have been texting too much).
If Freshers Week doesn’t feel like the beginning of the greatest years of your life, don’t panic.
It’s only a week.
You have four bloody years to become whoever the hell you’re going to be.
Let yourself take them.
