Don’t Forget Your Friends

During secondary school you will have made friends.  When you leave for university your true friends will remain.  Remember to keep in contact with them (if they’re worth it this will seem effortless) and remember that one day you will need to know who to trust.  With all the facebook lark many people may have up to 100 “friends” or more!  These are contacts and very useful!  You may only have 2 or 3 really close friends that you might call brother or sister.  Don’t forget them.

Read

There is no substitute for reading.  You’ll need to read around your subject and its also incredibly useful to read the paper.  Knowing what’s going on is very useful when it comes to writing essays.  It’s a big world out there and there’s lots going on all the time.  I try and keep up on world affairs just by reading the Sunday Times each week – £2 instead of 65p a day.  It gives a good summary of the weeks news including the business side of things.  Don’t bury your head in the sand and keep up with the world.

Get up in the morning

Seriously, I know this may seem like a drag but it is soooo beneficial!  You need to be careful though as you need to make sure you get enough sleep.  This is particularly important in your second and third years. 

By getting up in the morning you get that little bit of time to yourself.  You don’t need to rush to a particular lecture, you won’t forget things.  what I mean is try and start a regime.  Say 7.30am – 8am in the week to perhaps 9 or 10 at the weekend.  I find that if I am not up and going by 10 o’clock the day jst dsappears and all of a sudden the stress and worry comes back as to whether I am going to meet deadlines.  It really helps to drag yourself out of bed!  After all, in the real world we’d have to be going to work anyway!  Least all we have to do is sit in lectures and pretend to listen (always best to listen properly though!).  Don’t be lazy – you’ll be back in that bed before you know it!  Time goes to quickly! 

Plan ahead

Make sure you take the time to plan the work out that needs doing.  Jot down the key deadlines in a program such as Outlook.  This helps a lot with knowing how many weeks you have left and also how many days (and plenty of time) you still have to do the work.  You shouldn’t worry about the work if you plan it well.  By planning I mean really thinking about the work before you even start.  This means looking at articles on the web or readin te odd clip in a book or magazine.  Jot these down though or at least where you can find them quickly again as this will help you a lot in the long run!!  Especially when referencing your work. 

Save yourself the stress and worry.  If you have any major worries always ask the lecturer concerned.  I find emails are best for this as you can store the email for reference later (or evidence!).  If you can, see if you can enjoy the work.  Imagine your working for your own company and it’s going to cost millions if its not done, or something like that.   

Sleeeeeep zzzzzzzzzzz

It’s important.  Don’t listen to any of this “sleep when you’re dead” crap.  You need it to recharge, tackle the next day.  If needs be, get some ear plugs – I did!  You realise sleep is important because you get more out of the day and you don’t feel like you’ve wasted precious moments.  Trust me university life goes all too quickly!  Sometimes that will be great, sometimes that won’t. 

Be careful during freshers

Be careful during freshers week!  At first everyone may seem friendly, but overtime you’ll get to know people a lot better and they may not be as friednly as they first seemed.  Be careful about what information you give away about yourself.  Dont get drunk with complete strangers!  They dont know you  very well so they may decide not to look after you if you get into trouble.  You may have your wallet stolen, personal information, identity, anything!  Be careful but have fun!

Get to Lectures

Yes I know its a drag and mostly boring!  You won’t like all you’re modules – no chance so don’t kid yourself.  Make sure you have the bigger picture in mind though.  You’ll only be doing it for perhaps 12 weeks at maybe 2 hours a week so don’t let it get you down it’s not worth it. 

By attending, something must be going in.  If you can’t attend make sure you catch up or at least know what’s going on.  You don’t want to miss important coursework setting and deadlines.  I can honestly say I haven’t attended all my lecures.  Whooops!  But trust me, the ones I do attend, I feel sort of wiser and well, the exams are certainly easier.

Heckle the Landlord

For your second and third/final (hopefully not first) year heckle, but do it politely.  I am sure, unless you are very very very lucky you will at some point have a very annoying landlord!  The ones who are there to take money off you, who pretend to want to help you…yeh right!  If things aren’t right it’s up to you to sort it out, and it probably won’t happen over night! 

Always be polite, you don’t want to give them a reason not to do some work.  I have had work carried out which was completely wrong!  like knocking down the wrong wall!  That cost me 3 weeks of valuable uni time.  Don’t let it happen to you!  Haggle for rent reductions if work is done…we all like to save when we’re living off a loan.

Go into Halls

I can’t stress this enough.  Before going to my first uni I was adament that I would go into a nice house and make sure I didn’t end up living in some of the messes I had read about; some might call me a snob – I may agree!  The house was great but I learned quickly that it’s not necessarily where you live, but who you live with.  At my second uni I thought I had got into halls.  I soon realised yes I was, but because I was late applying they put 5 of us in this little “big” house out of the way as the other places were full.  We were also 3 miles out from the main uni and all of us had to get the bus each day (on tha campus).  Heck, what a way to meet people!  But it wasn’t halls with people above and people below.  Believe it or not you may need to know a few people when it comes to living arrangements in the third year. 

I am having difficulty now finding numbers for places because of missing the halls experience.  Crap really can be fun you know!!  Real fun!!  And my do I have some memories!  Unless asked I won’t tell you what we got up to!  I may get into trouble!

Choose Your University Carefully

Take the time and effort to look at university’s carefully.  The government is keen to try and get people in to university now, pretty much to make them look good so be mindful of good “marketing” by a university!  I spent a year at one university thinking it would get better.  It didn’t.  If I had stayed I have no idea what kind of person I would be.  Probably a loser.  I took the decision to move in the summer and it wasn’t until September that I had a place offered to me by the new choice.  The difference between the two universities was incredible.  One was offering 6 lectures a week and the other 22 – for the same course!  Big difference!  It always helps give you structure to your day.  Trust me, it’s good!  You feel like you’ll have achieved something.