The Sporadic Diary of a University Fresher
Created | Updated May 18, 2006
For those of you who haven't come across me before, I'm a fresher1 at the University of York in the UK, reading history. I thought some of the hootoo community might be interested to hear what life's like here, whether for nostalgia or any other reason. So read on...
Back Again
I'm very sorry that I haven't written anything for The Post in quite some time, but to be honest, I haven't had much to say. Now though, I can update you.
On the house front, we didn't get our first choice house and were prepared to settle for a worse house (though by no means bad). One member of the group wasn't happy about it so, on a whim, we went to look at another house which had just become availbale. It was a good job we did, because as we came out we all looked at each other and knew we wanted it, so it was straight down to the property company's office to secure it. The contract is signed now, everything's ready to go. The location could not be better, you really can't get a house closer to campus.
I had some horrible open exams at the end of last term. I had to write 2x2000 word essays in two days. I had an absolute nightmare when the time came to print them out. I don't have my own printer, so I'd saved each essay twice, once on my computer and once on my pen drive. Or so I thought. I went to the computer room to print it out, but the essay wasn't showing in my pen drive. Assuming it was the computer, I went to the library to use those. No luck there either. Given that I now had about 15 minutes before I had to hand it in, I was getting panicky. Back to my college, I tried a friend's computer, which also failed to show it, then a helpful third year living in our corridor offered to lend me his pen drive to save the essays directly on to there from my computer. This worked, I printed them on his computer, and handed them in about 15 minutes late. It was a very stressful few days, so I'm going to blame that for my managing to save the essays on my C drive and my D drive, rather than the pen drive.
Over the five week long Easter holidays, I volunteered at an Age Concern shop, since I knew it was unlikely that I would be able to find paid work for such a time period and I thought I might as well do something useful. I worked a total of 23 hours and it was actually quite enjoyable. I must have been out of practice at working though, since I got tired towards the end of the three hour shifts, when I used to work eight hour shifts in my old job. Maybe it was because the pace was so much more laid back.
Anyway, this term has been going well so far, I'm finding my module on History and Archaeology particularly interesting. Last weekend I took a trip to visit my brother in Sheffield, and I've played badminton for the college twice now. In the first fixture we lost all of the games (though I maintain that we would have done much better if we had been using the new scoring system as opposed to the old one - we wouldn't have won, but would have got far more points) and when we turned up for the second one we were informed that the team we were supposed to be playing had showed up an hour earlier than us ready to play. Someone got the time wrong, so it looks as though we lost on a walkover. In other sports news, York lost the yearly Roses varsity fixture against Lancaster (Roses - like Wars of the Roses, get it?) which was particularly bad news since I have a friend at Lancaster. It was away though, so I have high hopes for next year.
On the JCRC front, we're currently organising our college summer extravaganza which at the moment stands as a barbecue followed by a booze cruise down the river, and also sorting out Fresher's Week for next year.
York looks lovely in the summer but, of course, the centre of town is full of tourists and it's only going to get worse. I can snipe about it since I live here. Seriously though, it's great.
Till next time, have a great fortnight!
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