Fighting Freshers’ Flu

It goes by many names… every first year’s reoccurring nightmare, every graduate’s secret trauma, the phobia of second and third year’s alike. The dreaded Freshers’ Flu.

Whether you’ve been a freshers’ zombie or not, chances are you’ll have met one. If you are a fresher, you’ll either beat them or join them. Caged up in what the establishment has dubbed ‘student accommodation,’ you’re simply a control group for something all too real and far too disgusting. There’s many rumours as to who’s behind the outbreaks – Umbrella Corp? All we know that it’s called Freshers’ Flu and that twenty-first century medicine has no cure.

Maybe it’s an alien parasite, some extra-terrestrial organism finding its feet on our world, targeting our universities first. Of course, it’s hard to rule out the Flood whose contagions have rampaged across the stars for eons. Could it have escaped the hold of the Master Chief and made landfall on campus?

Those flashy red fronds would go down a treat at Pop. Image Credit: commorancy/Flickr.

Although it’s a solid theory, the symptoms just don’t add up. Violent, unstable growths that transform our loved ones into swollen, lumbering thralls – no comparison for this plague that continues to ravage freshers each year.

No, Freshers’ Flu does its work on the inside, sapping each of us of our will to live, our drive to party, our ability to attend our timetabled seminars. You or I could be carriers, and we will have to battle this together.

We’ll take arms against this mighty flu just as our heroes of old did, just as Marcus Fenix raised a chainsaw bayonet against the despised Locust and the Rust Lung they brought with them. Although we fight with different tools, the overwhelming, explosive end to Imulsion sickness is all too familiar.

But freshers’ flu works in more subtle ways and its sufferers meet a fate far worse than exploding. In fact, this transformation of an earnest first year into a dead-eyed shamble could be an outbreak of something far more familiar.

Freshers’ Flu does its work on the inside, sapping each of us of our will to live, our drive to party, our ability to attend our timetabled seminars.

Could it be some laboratory concoction that zombifies these freshers? And must we evade its cloying hold for the rest of our days on campus? Perhaps The Walking Dead is the best prep for uni that any of us could have. Not that this infection seems to slow our brains but drain our bodies, leaving us hunched over laptops and tissue paper mountains each night.

No amount of prosthesis or special effects make-up can match the transmogrifying combination of Freshers’ Flu and Purple. Image Credit: Casey Florig/Flickr.

Perhaps this Freshers’ Flu is yet another cover-up of Umbrella’s design, a Green Flu that grants us the power to just make it to Kasbah only so that we can spread our disease more totally. No, the reality is that not even the t-Virus could change a human being so.

So just what is it? Science has no answer. God declined to comment. We hope that you never find out first-hand, but will instead work with us to prevent its spread. From Cryfield to Westwood, the miasma creeps across our campus, taking goose and student alike. It is unparalleled by anything our consoles could have prepared us for. It is Freshers’ Flu and it is among us.