Reflections on Freshers' Week 2022
My first year flat’s common room pinboard.
Having arrived at Newcastle University three weeks ago as a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed first-year student, I have had the pleasure of experiencing freshers' week in its full force. And whilst it was full of all the fun and excitement I was expecting, freshers' does have another side to it- one I find frequently shrouded in shame and rarely acknowledged by my peers. Although the glossy image of freshers' presented to us through conversations with family, social media and universities is true, it isn’t always as pretty as the pictures. Beneath the new dorm rooms to decorate, the wild parties that went into the night and the glammed-up group pictures shared on Instagram, many of us found freshers' week hard. Despite this being often overlooked, I would like to assure you that there is no shame in feeling as though your first week may not have lived up to the sparkling social dream you expected it to be.
On arrival, one of the main questions in the forefront of my mind was, why is freshers' week sold to us as ‘the best time of our lives’? Despite doing all the things I thought I was supposed to do - clubbing, drinking, socialising, going to freshers' events - I still felt as though something was missing. I do believe much of the freshers' dream is rooted in a genuine excitement for the blank slate university provides us with and the liberation of living an independent life, free from the shackles of our parents or family. After all, it is an incredibly exciting time. For many of us, freshers' week is the first real taste of independence and adulthood. But, some part of me also believes that the heavy glamorization of freshers' week may be a by-product of the growing commodification of university education within our current system. As many universities slowly transform into quasi-businesses, the university experience has become something to advertise and institutions adopt commercial marketing techniques in order to attract more students. Considering this, it is surely unsurprising that our first week gets blown up to be the best thing ever. Could the freshers' dream be the front line of a new era in higher education? An era where the university experience is placed on a supermarket shelf, as something to buy rather than participate in?
So, beneath the layers of expectation, what is freshers' week actually like? Obviously, it is important to bear in mind that our experiences are all individual. Everyone’s freshers' week looks different. Maybe you had the out-every-night--fun-never-stops experience…or maybe you didn’t. For me, freshers' was exciting, fun and full-on. But it was also hard at times. I was contending with everything at once: being away from home and in a brand new city, having to cook for myself, managing my own money, navigating my way around campus, unpacking, meeting my flatmates and finding friends. Managing all of this at once felt a bit overwhelming and I often felt lost, both in a geographical and emotional sense! I missed my family, I missed the feeling of knowing what I was doing and knowing where I was going. As I started my new life at university, I struggled to let go of my old one - the one I’d been leading for the last eighteen years. With all that in mind, it seems a little naïve to me that freshers' week is painted out to be an easy ride. Is it not more realistic to view it as a slightly bumpier period of adjustment? Can we not acknowledge the difficulties of our early days in university, rather than write them out of the story? The bottom line is: living by yourself for the first time, away from your friends and family and in a new city is a really hard thing to do. Finding it emotionally draining or difficult is understandable and it seems sad to find these completely normal experiences so interwoven with shame. If we spoke about them more, would we feel less lonely in our new surroundings and less frightened of our own feelings?
I think it is also worth considering how the pandemic has affected my particular year group, and how this may make our first year of university a slightly higher hurdle to jump over. After all, if 2020 taught us anything, it was that staying at home was the safest option for everybody. After one year of being effectively housebound and another year spent coming in and out of lockdowns, the gap from home to higher education has surely widened since becoming so accustomed to living in our own spaces. Although the immediate daily impact of the pandemic had softened this year, the ripple effect it is having on our long-term emotional well-being is not something to be underestimated. As time passes since the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak, it is important to remember that our freshers' week has been set against a backdrop of social, economic and political turbulence. The global and thus individual impact of the pandemic has no doubt influenced our experience of early university life very much.
Despite - or perhaps because - of all this, I can safely say that the ups and downs of freshers' week have been a great life lesson. They taught me how to stay strong even when I felt weak and they taught me how to keep my feet on the ground, even when I felt swept away. Having now spoken to many others about their freshers' experiences, I can also write with certainty that almost all of us were feeling the same way. So, now united in our collective cluelessness, is it not the perfect time to break down this barrier of shame and embarrassment that comes with feeling homesick, lonely and uncomfortable during our early days of university? We all felt it, so let’s start to acknowledge it rather than sweep it under the rug. Freshers' week is full of opportunity, newly-found freedom, and adventure. But it can also be quite demanding. The beauty of perceiving freshers' week in a new way is that it doesn’t have to be just good or just bad. The fresher's experience is inherently messy, but in my eyes, that’s exactly what makes it what it is.
