Freshers’ week and first year are the most brilliant time of your uni career.
Get your priorities right. Freshers consists of however many weeks of hedonistic pursuits you can manage before you either crave a semi-sophisticated routine or your body finally submits. Enjoy testing the limits – the state is funding your inspection of the toilet bowl. Bliss.
It’s also a week (and more) that you spend adjusting. Tenants, a new city, a new home, independence, a new sport, new people surrounding you, etc. Feeling jaded, a little homesick (so is the person claiming they aren’t), hanging or snotty, and suddenly the clocks have gone back, and the clock strikes DEADLINES.
Maybe a little more is riding on this deadline season, considering you missed the first three weekly multiple-choice quizzes worth 10% of your grade. Seeking to compensate for the missing 4%, you switch a night out for a night in and an afternoon nursing a hangover for an afternoon in the library I wish to tell you, get your priorities right.
First year is about learning, but not the academic kind. Learning in the exploring kind. Deep-fried Mars bars, Haggis, Innis and Gunn, Skye, Single Malt, Sonny and Vito’s, Catan (if you’re inclined that way), card games, card games that involve nasty concoctions, Edinburgh and people! Be as curious as possible. Glasgow is fantastic in that it’s a wonderfully international city and student community. Find out about other cultures, be curious about people; you’ll encounter some intelligent folk. Find out their methods of thinking and steal them.
As the great Rebecca Lucy Taylor tells us, prioritise pleasure.
Whatever you submit (as long as it doesn’t incur too drastic a time penalty) will pass, I promise. A pass is all you need to achieve and, frankly, care about.
Don’t say no to the wholesome activity your flatmate has invited you to, “because you have too much work on”. Don’t say no to an invite from someone you know from a course, to whatever it is, wherever it is. These are opportunities and experiences, even if one of them sounds a bit naff, that will pass you by, opportunities and experiences that include the potential for meeting someone new, merely interesting or exciting. On the scale of what is actually important, meeting new people, even if they turn out to be naff, is more valuable to you, in this moment, than an essay that is only going to be skimmed.
This is all in honour of the best advice I ever received at Uni, which came from a meeting with my personal tutor (when those existed) in freshers week of my first year. This Doctor of Philosophy told me: Isaac, you have to genuinely try to fail.
I pass the same (tried and tested) advice to you now.
