What do you think of when you picture the typical freshers’ week? For most people, it’s constant parties and drinking till they drop with new friends and flatmates.
But what does it look like if you don’t enjoy partying or clubbing? If the idea of clubbing just seems like an expensive way to get physically and mentally overstimulated while leaving your clothes completely gross, then what do you do?
The unfortunate answer is often, you do nothing. Nights out are one of the main ways you meet people and make friends during freshers, so if you aren’t going out, you’re going to miss a massive opportunity to meet people and make memories.
Even beyond the nights out themselves, most early bonding between flatmates is done over pre-drinks, meaning you miss out on building those early relationships as well. This can easily spiral into feeling like an outsider within your own flat, as it feels like everyone else already knows one another, while you’re left tiptoeing around them.
The Freshers Feeling
Fresher’s week can easily be a horrible experience where it feels like you’re spending a week watching others have fun, wanting to join them, but knowing that if you were to go out with them, you would feel awful and just bring everyone else’s night down. It ends up being a week in which you’ve never felt more out of place and alone, despite everyone saying that university is where you would “find your people”.
Even long past freshers, even beyond first year as a whole, the spectre of that supposed universal experience that you missed out on will still follow you. Friends will casually bring up the things they did during freshers, and it will feel like everyone else in the room can relate to it, everyone except you.
The feeling will happen again and again with the likes of Halloween and refreshers; you’ll see key moments of student life pass you by simply because clubbing isn’t your thing.
And with every event that passes by, that spectre gets bigger and stronger as it feels like you’re missing the key moments that make student life special.
I don’t know if you can ever truly get rid of the spectre, but you can make it less oppressive simply by living your life and making amazing memories that you never could in a nightclub.
You may never be able to relate to the experience of non-stop freshers’ club nights, but you can make your own brilliant memories, and when you find people who can relate to those, you’ll know that they’re a keeper.
This article featured in the first-ever printed edition of BRAW Magazine, Close Encounters. You can read more of our Close Encounters articles here.
Featured Image by Kerry Lloyd/Erin Schoolar
Features Editor and Head of Podcasting.
Fourth-year Journalism and Politics student.
Primarily focus of Politics, Technology, Gaming and Pop-Culture
