Saturday 23 February 2013

First Year at University

This is predominately going to be an apology post on the lack of updates over January and February (great start to 2013, I hear you cry...). Like many bloggers, I have been inundated with Uni work and barely had a chance to talk to my own parents in the past couple of weeks, let alone type a few words (apart from those in essays and assignments).



Now, I feel, is a good time to reflect upon the past term and a half of my University career/ experience. After my year out from education I felt unequipped and unprepared to embark on a degree. I worried myself silly in the prior week and a half before freshers week and tried to cram in some reading and looked over old sixth form notes. A year not in education and away from the structure of the 9 - 3:30 schedule, homework, essays, coursework, exams, the rigorous revision preparation, teachers pressuring and imparting their knowledge, daily banter with friends, lunch and break times sat giggling and wondering about what the future held, is a long time! For me I grew up so much, learnt a lot about the real world both in a working environment and through visiting other countries and seeing a bit of what the outsides of my hometown had to offer.

As a typical right of passage I am spending my first year in halls of residence, luckily for me I'm not with all the 18 year olds plucked straight from college or sixth form, but have been plonked in a flat with all "gap year" students. I remember first arriving in halls like it were yesterday, my parents and sister drove me and a car load of my things up to my University town, they helped me unpack and then we went for a pub lunch beside the river Thames! I felt numb about the experience, it hadn't quite hit me at this point that I was leaving home and about to spend three years studying for a degree!

If I learnt one thing from living in halls its that first impressions can sometimes be right (in the case of two of my flatmates...) and sometimes, they are so wrong (in the case of one of my closest uni mates). My freshers week was a laugh, I got ridiculously drunk every night, dressed up in some of the craziest outfits, danced and met new people from all types of walks of life and had a good time.



The rest of the term was interesting, I met another of my closest uni friends on my course at first, and then again in the first Travel Society meeting and we hit it off straight away. We have so much in common its great, I don't think I've ever met anyone quite like her - friends for life! I plodded through with the uni work, struggled with contrasting thoughts of whether I actually wanted to be at  Uni and continued to get drunk...

Finally I feel I've found my feet.

I have a lovely circle of friends; I've started to thoroughly enjoy my course and get into it and I've taken up yoga, and the position of Co-editor of the Travel section at the Student newspaper!

Peace out travellers!

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