Fresher's Week
Created | Updated Jan 5, 2004
Fresher’s week is supposed to be The Best Week Of Your Life. Whether or not this is actually true tends to vary a lot from one person to the next. It happens in Universities at the beginning of each academic year for all the first year students, to help them ‘settle in’, prepare themselves mentally for a new academic year, and get used to the surroundings. What really happens is that no-one does any work, any surroundings are generally only stumbled across while drunk, and a lot of alcohol is involved. Most people will end up either exhausted, hung over, or ill, but generally all three.
However Fresher’s week is good because no parents are involved, which gives most students a newfound freedom for sleeping with everyone else and staying out late. This also means that you can get away with not eating any vegetables for a whole week. Fresher’s week is generally feared throughout the whole of the UK by anyone who lives near a University or has children.
One of the purposes of Fresher’s week is so you can ‘meet people’, and then promptly forget their names, and often where they came from, what A-levels they did, and what they’re studying. It would save everyone a lot of confusion if Universities just made first years wear labels with their names on for the whole first week, however students would probably disagree to this on the grounds of Not Looking Cool. A good way to ‘meet people’ on the first day is leave your room door open, offer everyone biscuits, and grin inanely at everyone you meet.
Another good way to ‘meet people’ is to go along to the Fresher’s fayre and join everything. Most people like to warn against doing this, but as long as you try and stick to things that are a) free, and b) not the Battle Re-enactment Society, it can’t really cause any harm. It is a brilliant way to get involved, gives you something to do, and, most importantly, gives you a chance to meet more people. Hurrah! If you go along to Fresher’s fayre you will also probably be given a lot of free things. This is good, because students aren’t supposed to have any money.
The one thing that Fresher’s week will probably not involve a lot of (apart from work) is Proper Food. This doesn’t seem to make a difference whether you’re in self-catering or not. Once you leave home you realize that parents are occasionally quite useful for some things, like Being Able To Cook, and dirty washing. Fresher’s week is usually spent trying to find where the University’s sources of food actually come from, either getting the meal times wrong, or missing them due to being a) asleep, b) inebriated, c) dead etc, ordering pizza a lot, and eating jaffacakes for dinner. Or simply surviving on alcohol.
However, if you do happen to find the canteen in your halls at the right time, here is a Note Of Warning: hall food is not like normal food. It takes some adjusting to. You may find that your stomach will try and retaliate. Tell your stomach that it will have to put up with it for the next year, so it had better get used to it. By the end of the week it will probably have given in and from that point onwards you will be able to eat anything. There is however one good point about hall food, which is that it makes a good conversational point, mainly because you can complain about any of it. Some good lines to try are ‘Er…what is this?’ ‘What! That’s not a (insert foodstuff here)!’ or ‘Didn’t we have this last night too?’ Failing that, prod your food with your fork and look quizzically at the person opposite you.
Do not expect to sleep during Fresher’s week. This is partly due to the fact that even if you decide not to go out one night, everyone else will, come back really late, then decide to have chair-races down the corridor and wake you up, and partly due to the inevitable fire alarms. Fire alarms are an integral part to Fresher’s week, especially if they are at three in the morning or some other equally ridiculous time. These will either be due to a) burnt toast, or b) the University deciding that it would be good for ‘bonding’ and ‘moral boosting’, and other such stupid ideas.
Fresher’s week will also probably involve the following things:
a) Shopping trolleys.
b) Queues. Queues for the health centre, queues for enrollment, queues concerning money, queues for Important Looking Bits Of Paper, etc. Queues are good because you can also complain about them to the people either side of you and make some more friends.
c) Getting lost. If you get lost and end up asking a third year for directions, go in the opposite direction to what they tell you, as this is probably going to be the right way. Maps are more reliable, because they can’t lie to you.
d) Pub crawls. Pub crawls are probably quite good for Getting To Know Your Surroundings, as hopefully you will be sober enough at the start to remember any important-looking bits of intervening scenery between one pub and the next, like banks and supermarkets and things. Pub crawls are also good for ‘meeting people’ i.e. by throwing up on them.
e) Spin the Bottle and Truth or Dare. In a game of Spin the Bottle you can guarantee that at least one person will end up naked.
f) Traffic cones.
If you are the sort of person for whom seven days filled with alcohol, no sleep, and constant partying is the sort of thing you’ve been waiting for since you were thirteen then Fresher’s week is like an alternative version of heaven. If not, don’t worry. It gets much better.
