The Home/Uni Balance

I’m almost at the end of my second year at university now, which is crazy to me! One of the most frequently asked questions I have, by family, friends, Freshers is ‘How long are you going home for?’ I still think of ‘Home’ as they place where my family live and that’s where I spend my summers and generally Christmas and Easter. In my first year I was conscious of not going home too early on in the year. I was painfully homesick at the start of first year and immediately wanted to go home. I held off for five weeks though and this was such a good decision. Had I gone running home in week 1, I never would have come back, and then I would have missed out on some of the best times of my life so far. In first year, the struggle is very much about resisting the temptation to run home every weekend. Whether that be for the home-cooked food, for your mum doing your washing or simply because you’d rather spend time with your ‘old’ friends than the people you’ve met at Uni.

Moving out of Halls

The bubble of first year Uni life is great. Sometimes so great, that thinking about leaving it and the comfort of Halls when moving into Second Year, makes life way too stressful. I’ll tell you straight up that it is a stressful experience looking for somewhere to live in second year, but I hope the advice in the rest of this post will help ease some of your concerns and answer some of your questions.

The first, and honestly probably the hardest part of the whole experience, is choosing who to live with. Ah memories. At the end of the day, whatever happens, the odds are you won’t live far away from any of your friends so don’t be too worried, but if you have the chance, pick people you get on with, people who you trust, people who will look after you and people who are reliable. I hear a lot of people hesitating to live with people on their course because it may be too intense. Let me tell you, there is nothing more intense than living with people you can’t stand. Right now I live with two of my best friends at Uni and I never think of them as housemates. They’re my friends. This is great for many reasons. Emotionally, you never know when you may have a hard moment, day or week, so if your friend is living just down the landing, this is a massive help. I also find this works out better financially. For example, we do all our food and house shopping together and split the bill three ways. It prevents arguments and eating together is not only good for us socially, it’s also more cost effective.