Everyone You'll Meet at University Freshers Week

Freshers Week 2022 is most definitely here. Tens of thousands of 18-20-year-olds, all with a severe case of main character syndrome, are currently being released out into the big, wide real-ish world. If you are one of these university freshers: welcome, good luck, try not to drop your colander or your three-piece duvet set on the stairs of your halls whilst you’re moving in, etc. Welcome to a week of bright neon lights, blurry memories and bad-but-ultimately-character-building decisions. You will meet many people during this time of your life. Here, we have outlined some of them. 

Maintaining a clean kitchen that’s shared between six to ten people is easily done, as long as there is a mutually high level of A) respect for oneself and others, B) discipline and C) hygiene standards. In first-year student accommodation, most residents are still teenagers. Because of this, most of your flatmates will possess at best one of the above three traits – and that’s being deeply fucking generous. 

There will be one of you who, somehow, straggles even further behind the rest, causing flat-wide sorrow and rage at their inability to wash up, not steal other people’s mugs and leave them to grow green and furry under their bed or put raw meat in the fridge, where it belongs. There is almost nothing you can do to stop their behaviour except sit back, relax and let the flat atmosphere sour into a mouldy pit of cleaning cliques and passive-aggression. Strap yourselves in.

I would say this title applies to about three-quarters of the men doing business studies at uni. Some (the ones who posted angry Snapchat stories when Andrew Tate got banned from social media) are worse than others (the ones who watch these videos in their spare time), but all of them own at least one item of clothing from Goose & Gander and all of them will eventually end up with job titles that make you feel briefly but very intensely sad.

You will knock on his door in Freshers Week, shout-mumbling something about “wristbands” and “ring of fire”. Hearing nothing, you will gently push his door open and find him before the mirror: AirPods in, tripod set up, contorting his limbs to what appears to be a sped-up John Mayer remix. Ah, right. He is learning a TikTok dance. He sees you and jumps four feet into the air, before composing himself and saying “Yeah, that’s chill, see you in a sec”. 

As you walk back down the corridor you will realise that he is split down the middle – he leads a double life, showing one persona to the screen and one to the real world. 

One side of him has been gifted a promotional package of the new Lynx hair gel, and he is doing this 😗 to his phone camera tripod, turning his head from one side to the other as the light glints off his gelled hair. The other side of him drinks a whole bottle of Disaronno at pre-drinks, starts shrieking about how his mum used to make him him eat sugar-free granola for breakfast every morning and that’s ultimately why he got the tattoo on his wrist that says “TRUST x NOBODY”, then falls down the stairs on the way back from the club and doesn’t leave his room after for five solid days. 

This Hannah-Montana-esque realisation will haunt you until he wins you over with the alluring promise that he can “get you free VIP tickets to Radio 1’s Big Weekend next year, I swear, probably”. Welcome to the high life, baby.

You match with this person on Hinge, and so you look at them in a brooding and sultry sort of way whenever you see them at the door to your lectures, but you do not end up fucking them; this is because they are, unfortunately and obviously, still emotionally tied to their partner from Year 12.

You do not match with this person on Hinge. You think to yourself that this must have been a mistake – some kind of technological error on their part, perhaps – so you still look at them sultrily and broodingly, but you do not end up fucking them either. This is because they don’t fancy you, probably because they saw you being sick behind a bush before lectures that one Tuesday morning and, understandably, will never get that cursed image out of their head.

Someone in your halls will be stupid enough to fall for this guy’s whole Thing, and they will end up in a rancid financial pickle that starts with the promise of making “Easy 💸💸💸”, and ends with a life-altering debt spiral. You may think you are above being this stupid person, but you are not; no-one is. Use your head, or suffer the eternal consequences.

Let’s paint a hypothetical picture: you’re at a Fresher’s Fair. You stumble across a stall for – let’s say, for example – “Yoga Society”. Looking at it, you feel a strange sensation. Something inside you has awoken, from some earlier, younger version of yourself – an ambitious 15-year-old who had fleeting visions of being able to stretch their limbs into a wide and impressive array of intricate positions. Behind the stall stands a healthy-looking person whose eyes are glinting with the light of someone who feels truly alive. As you walk past, they hand you a leaflet. “Come and join Yoga Society,” they say. 

You stop and think – are you really going to be that person who joins a society? – before coming to a resolute decision. “Oh,” you say, “you want me to join your little ‘society’, do you? You want me to ‘enrich’ my ‘life’ with this ‘thing that I am interested in’? No thanks, pal. I won’t be doing that, main reason being because I’m not a Fucking Nerd. If you need me, you can find me in the club, dancing and looking fit and getting absolutely obliterated on Class A drugs.” You leave the hall.

(This was a hypothetical situation: Do not do this. If you spend every single evening of your first year going out, there is a very real chance you will give yourself permanent brain damage – take it from me. If you see a society and you like the look of it, just fucking join it. It costs, like, £2, and it will probably make your life better.)

This girl only exists in the liminal space between the gates of your halls and the front door of your block of flats. Most frequently spotted walking back from the gate with a Domino’s box or walking back from the laundry room with an IKEA crate full of socks. Whether she actually lives in the halls or just disappears magically into the ether once she’s done her laundry or collected her Domino’s is unclear.

Slay, etc. 

This man has the absolutely lethal combination of a) a constantly renewing desire to reinvent himself, and b) a large, steady stream of money from his parents. 

He will come home one night in fresher’s week in full ice hockey gear, having decided that that’s Who He Is, now. He adds “❄️🏒” to his Tinder bio, and goes to practise sessions for one week before hanging up his £375 kit, never to be touched again. The next month, he goes to a vintage sale pop-up. The amount he spends there is eye-watering, and he comes back clad with a clashing array of Polo Ralph Lauren, Arc’teryx, Tommy Hilfiger and Palace. The following week, having now been to enough indie club nights to deduce that Girls Love That Shit, he buys a box-fresh new guitar from Amazon. This cycle repeats itself infinitely.

This constant transformation is funny to watch for a while, in a season-long-sitcom-subplot sort of way. Eventually, though, you remember that you, too, desire to change yourself – that just like him, you also feel pangs of yearning to escape the cocooned void of your reality and emerge, butterfly-like, with a crisp new wardrobe and a sense that you could probably pull literally anyone in the world. Actually, though, you have £17 in the bank for the foreseeable, so all you can really do is get the bus into town and buy some fun necklaces from Primark; the only cocoon you will be emerging from today, my dear, is the one from “person who has had no pints” to “person who has had three pints and also now owes their flatmate £4.50”. Ah, what a beautiful time it is to be a student; what a beautiful time it is to be alive.

@ionaeee