Got the Freshers blues?

Ah, freshers. By now you’ve probably been welcomed to Warwick more than you care to remember – including several times, hopefully, by this newspaper. Perhaps you’re leafing through the copy of the Boar you found in your welcome bag. I hope so. It took us three days to pack all the damn papers into those bags. Sigh.

Without doubt, in any case, you’ll almost certainly have been told that here begins the best three years of your short life to date: three years of unbridled joy, of intellectual achievement punctuated by legendary nights out, sporting success, and a not insubstantial amount of sex. That’s fair enough really; nobody’s going to tell you that you’re going to have a bloody awful time and that you’ll wish you never came. Well, I hope not.

Yet such is the rush to initiate our freshers by the curious process of herding them into the Union, getting them drunk, and then chucking them out again at 2am, that we often forget that not everybody’s cut out for two weeks of pure hedonism.

What remains of the Freshers’ experience in my memory is no more than a hazy blur. But I remember very well the feeling of utter dread that seized me as soon as I arrived, the loneliness and the homesickness.

There’s no shame in feeling like that. It’s so very easy to feel out of your depth when everybody around you seems to be revelling in the new-found freedom of university. Wanting to hide in your room wishing you were back at home is not at all unusual. I would venture that most people feel like that at one point or another in their first few weeks.

Rest assured, though, homesickness does fade. Those drunkards shouting in the corridor, who might seem a little intimidating now, will soon come to be your friends. The campus, which might seem so impersonal, will soon become a second home. Don’t let it get the better of you: go out, talk to people, join societies. You definitely won’t regret it.

If it all does become too much, though, there are a great many people out there ready to help or at least listen. Talk to a friend or a parent or speak to a personal tutor. Warwick’s counselling service is staffed by friendly and sympathetic professionals, and you also have a team of elected SU officers whose job it is to listen to your concerns. Send them an e-mail or drop by their offices – they rarely bite and, in any case, they get paid a healthy salary so you might as well make sure they earn it.

One of Warwick’s great strengths is its diversity. No student is the same, and not everybody wants to go out and get trollied every night. Some of you would be better off with a book and a cup of tea, or a good film, or a session on World of Warcraft, or whatever it is that you’re into. And that’s just fine. University is, as they say, what you make of it. Look after yourself, and before you know it you’ll be graduating.