Beginning University life: Expectations Vs Reality

University is a massive part of a lot of people’s lives, whether it’s the next step up from Sixth Form and college, or during an apprenticeship programme, or even a thing you do later on in life, it plays a significant role, and many people go into it with the expectation of it changing their lives forever. Now I’m not saying that it won’t because more likely than not it will but a lot of the time Uni life or the ‘Uni experience’ is very over glamourised. When people think of Uni nowadays for a lot of people going out every night and partying until the early hours of the morning, springs to mind, making loads of friends with your flatmates and classmates is also something that a lot of us think about when we go into Uni. Now these things do happen to some people, they party hard and make loads of new friends, but also people can have the complete opposite experience and I feel like this isn’t talked about enough. For many of us we struggle to make friends to begin with and don’t really have much of a social life, we are quite literally on our own.

It is a massive reality shock when we are left alone, for most of us it's our first time away from our families for such long periods of time and this can have a massive effect on us. I think in society Uni is described as being the catalyst of young people's life and that straight away they will make their forever friends and for a lot of us this isn’t the case.

For me I experienced the opposite of the expectation, I struggled a lot in the first few weeks of being in Uni. It first stemmed from being on my own for the first time and living away from my family and friends, this had always been something that had worried me even before I left but I thought that I would immediately bond with my flatmates, and it wouldn’t be too hard. I got this idea form listening to the people around me that had been to university and watching endless TikTok’s about how people had the time of their lives at Uni especially in the first few weeks; they said it was all about making friends and going out and if you didn’t do this ‘you weren’t doing Uni in the right way’ but for me this wasn’t the case. I was placed in a flat with all international students that came to the UK to only study, they hardly left their rooms and only did to go to their classes, this was something I was not expecting because I thought everyone that went to Uni was in the same boat and would always want to be in the kitchen or common areas trying to make friends. This impacted me in a massively negative way as I was all alone and didn’t speak to my flatmates as I barely saw them. This reality of Uni is truly not talked about enough like with all the TikTok’s and social media posts I saw none of them shined a light on this dark part of university life.

Not talking about this reality of Uni was something I couldn’t do, I feel that if I don’t talk about my experience with university and the implications it had on me then I wouldn’t be a proper journalist; this is something that needs to be spoken about more as it happens to so many people and it can make us feel isolated and alone not only in the sense of missing our family and friends but in the sense that we are the only ones going through this and everyone has it all figured out. This is so not the case, even now after I’ve made friends and am comfortable in this new chapter of my life, I still have moments when the reality of what I’m doing hits me and that’s okay, university is not this perfect experience where everything is glamourise and joyful it has its moments when the cons out way the pros but you do just have to keep persevering if it is something that you truly see yourself excelling in.

©Lucy Roberts, 2022