Starting at university

I've been intending to start a new blog about my time at university for a while but I've not had the time to do this so far since I'm a busy law student. I've got so many blog posts to make about university and studying law, that it's hard to know where to begin. So I thought I'd begin by telling you about how university was to begin with.


Although I was really glad to finally begin university after a boring gap year, where I had no one my age around me, student life started to get to me in the second week because it was hard to begin with.


One of the first problems with being a student is that you don't tend to have anyone, who you know, who you can turn to, around you, so at first you feel really lonely and as if the problems you have weigh on your mind. I thought that that was a problem when I was on my gap year but I at least had my parents to talk to then, whereas when you start at university it's hard to turn to someone the minute something goes wrong because it's not like school, where you're constantly surrounded by people. At university you see people when they walk into the kitchen or you go to seminars and lectures and possibly societies and extra-curricular activities. Admittedly this changes as you establish your friendship group because you begin to work out who you can trust and who you are closest to.



Nevertheless some people will have an easier time establishing their friendship group than others. Some people in my building/flat got on really well with each other, whereas I tend to find that although the people in my flat are nice people, they're not people I get on really well with. I get on quite well with 2 out of my 5 flat mates because one of them's really interested in international relations and current affairs and another shares my interest in ancient history and anthropology but they still have traits about them that really annoy me and mean that I can't be completely honest with them. I don't tend to get on well with my other flat mates because they only ever want to talk about a select group of topics like partying and don't talk so much about geeky topics.


I'd say that you start to establish your friendship group more clearly when you start your course and you meet more people, who are interested in the subject you study and who are doing more of the things that you are doing and indeed experiencing more of the problems that you are experiencing. I began making friends with people on my course via Facebook, when I discovered other lawyers through the Sussex freshers page, so one of my first friends on the course was someone who I happened to recognise from Facebook. I started to get to know other people, when I talked to the people sitting next to me in lectures. Nevertheless most of the people I spoke to in the first fortnight after getting to university, are not the people I speak to most nowadays. I became friends with one of my best friends on my course by complete accident, when I accidentally slept in during my seminar and had to go to a later version of the same seminar because although we didn't speak to each other during the seminar, we started talking to each other in our lecture on the next day as a result of the fact that we'd been in the same seminar. My friendship group changed a lot as a result of this because I met lots of other people through her.


I didn't think my friendship group would change a lot after a few weeks of hanging around with her and her friends but it suddenly did when this guy in my contract law seminar started talking to me after my seminar because he liked my enthusiasm, so he wanted to start a study group with me. As a result of this I started sitting next to him in a lot of my lectures. I know you're probably thinking that this is the start of a friendship that will become a relationship but it's really not because he has a girlfriend and he's a blond, so he's not my kind. I became better friends with a girl I met through mooting as a result of this, so it looks as if my friendship group could change again. It's not to say that I'm not still friends with the girl I met by accident and her group of friends because I am but at the moment I'm spending less time with her. I'm starting to finally talk to other people in/from my seminars and meet other people through them, so my friendship group at the end of the year could be very different to what it was at the beginning of this year.



I'm very careful as to who I associate with because I already paid the price of getting bad GCSE results by being surrounded by the wrong group of friends, who didn't take a great interest in their studies, so I'm eager to be surrounded by people who are interested in doing well and who I can share ideas with. That doesn't mean that I won't associate with people, who aren't so committed to their studies, because of course I will be polite to them and talk to them, if I need their help, and they can be really nice to talk to but I try to keep them at arms length, otherwise they probably won't be a good influence on me. If this is the case, I'll probably end up being friends with a lot of foreign students and black people because I tend to find that they are the most focused since foreign students have to pay to go to English university out of their own money and black people are often marginalised.

I feel less lonely than I did when I started university but I still feel closer to my friends from my last two years of school and for the foreseeable future, I can't see this situation changing.

The other part of starting university, that it takes a while to get used used to is the fact that you have to do all your domestic chores. This tired me out a lot in freshers week because I wasn't used to doing all my chores. But doing my domestic chores aswell as studying started to drive me mad after freshers week because law degrees are enough work on their own, so doing domestic chores aswell as studying law took a while to get used to.

I got around the problem of doing laundry by going back to my room to study, whilst my washing was still in the machine, and going back for it 35 minutes later. As soon as I could I got a clothes horse, so that I didn't have to pay for the tumble dryer but I found that it also saved me time aswell as money since it means that I don't have to plan my time around putting my clothes in the tumble dryer, since I can hang my clothes up to dry as I please.

All the same cooking and shopping are definitely the chores that it takes longest to get used to doing, since they are the most time-consuming chores. I tend to only cook foods that will take 30 minutes too cook, although sometimes I will spend 40 minutes cooking. I therefore don't cook anything like meat, moussaka, lasagne, etc., and I tend to cook/make pizza, fish, omlettes, eggs, pasta, quiche, fish cakes, prawns and mushrooms on toast and rice dishes. I often don't bother boiling my vegetables and instead eat them whilst the main part of my meal is in the oven/on the hob. On the whole I only go shopping once a week because I usually have lectures and seminars on 5 days on the week, so it makes more sense to go shopping at the weekend.