Discussing the Myth That You Make All Your Friends At University

Before I went to university there was one piece of advice that wouldn't go away. It was filtered down through friends' parents, older cousins and teachers—and before that it had been hanging around in television and film. Everything from Superbad to Toy Story 3 was telling me the same story: childhood ends, friends part ways, life begins. University wasn't just going to change my educational outlook, it was going to reshape me completely. Every friend or relationship I'd known until this point had been a practice run for the real thing. University was where I was going to meet my real best friends, my best man, my children's godparents and the love of my life.

Why does this matter? Well, if we're asking the question "should you go to university?" then surely the promise that you're going to make all your friends and lovers in an SU bar factors pretty heavily in that. It's probably the main reason we desire "the student experience". You never hear graduates reminiscing about specific course modules, or telling lengthy anecdotes about 'that really interesting seminar on body politics'. No, they talk about pub golf, catching chlamydia, fights in Tiki bars and "the night I met your mother".

Personally, I was terrified of this social revolution. By the time I was leaving my hometown for university, I had amassed a modestly-sized but thicker-than-thieves mob of friends. As the days before Fresher's Week dribbled away and my parents' hallway filled up with bowls and pillows, a collective concern grew among us. We knew we were friends 4 lyf, but inherited wisdom said this was it. The beginning of the end. We would go our separate ways, the texts would grow further and further apart, and soon our once indestructible squad would be nothing more than a courtesy pint every Christmas Eve.

Looking back, the expectation that you're going to meet the most important people in your life at university seems bizarre. Compared to the decade-plus you've spent with your home friends, you only have a few months with with your university mates. You're randomly sorted into accommodation blocks, with all the precise algorithmics of a tombola, only to have to navigate an entirely new set of people once you start lectures.

The model is totally unsustainable. It always goes like this: You'd meet someone on a night out, during Fresher's Week say, and realise you recognised them from one of your courses. You'd enjoy a brief 6-8 minute conversation with them in a smoking area. The next time you saw them in a lecture you'd smile and nod. The week after that you'd have a 40-second chat with them on the way back to the bus after the lecture. The week after that you'd sit next to them and have a couple of longer stretches of unbroken conversation, maybe something about what A-levels you did and what modules you thought you might do next year. By this point the endorphins would be rushing through you. This is it! Mum! Dad! I've made a mate! Then, the week after that would be the end of term and you'd never see them again. Trying to make friends at uni was the ultimate Sisyphean task. At least, that's what the bloke I chatted to once in my Stories and Storytelling in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds module reckoned.

Perhaps the idea made more sense 30 years ago. In an age before the internet and cheap international travel, maybe moving to Reading did seem like starting again. But our social patterns have changed. While I was at university I was in constant contact with my home friends via a private Facebook group, and Facetime meant we were able to stumble in fucked, cheesy chips in hand, and catch up on the dumb minutiae of the night immediately. In a smaller world, maybe the young adults of today are too world-weary and self-aware to have their lives changed by something as simple as leaving home.

It's also worth bearing in mind that before Tony Blair's target to see 50 percent of young adults attend university and the subsequent boom of the mid-1990s, there was a much firmer divide between those went and those who didn't. Think about how many parents take pride in their children being the "first in the family to go to university" - it's hard to imagine as many from our generation saying that. For our parents going to university was more tribal. Once you went, you were with your people. This was the start of grown-up life and as such whatever came before was filed neatly into "childhood".

Everybody's different, and obviously tonnes of people arrive and university and never look back. They grow beards, fall in love, and buy houses in Sheffield. Good for them. But for a lot of people the opposite is true, and they shouldn't be made to feel like they've failed or are missing out just because they prefer their home-mates, or they didn't go to university at all. For as long as university is packaged as the typical coming-of-age route, then the people who can't afford, or have no reason to go, are going to feel excluded. That's a myth we should dispel. All they are really being excluded from are a few strawpedos, some dodgy MD and a second-hand copy of Orientalism.

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