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Living with strangers

Of course, one of the weirdest things about university is that you are suddenly thrust into living with people who you have never met before, let alone your friends. This experience, it must be said, is entirely based on luck. Some people will love their flatmates, others will despise them, and some will obligingly ask how their day was in the kitchen. With that being said, that doesn’t mean that you cannot take any advice about living with particular people at uni.

At home, it’s easy to get accustomed to your group of friends. Once the year is done, you’ll have that leavers’ assembly thing, and, if you’re like me you won’t recognise half the people that attend. So, naturally, you have no idea how them sort of people live, what they like to do when they socialise, their habits of friendship. What university halls do, however, is force disparate groups of people into the same living space. If my flat had gone to my school at home, I would say that I would only be friends with one or two of them, and that’s probably an overestimation of my open-mindedness back then. But that’s the great thing about uni: you’re there to experience new things, not just solidify what you already know.

So be excited for this. I wish I was told this earlier; the most I got was ‘you get some right weirdos at uni’. And indeed you do, but it only opens your eyes up more to the society and country you live in. You’ll begin to recognise how sheltered or relaxed your upbringing was; what your parents focused on; your financial situation; your social idiosyncrasies; how good a cook you are; how clean you actually are (and not how clean your mum tells you you are).

Even if you really don’t like your flat at first – maybe you feel like you just don’t connect with them – give them a chance. At the beginning of uni I had it in my mind that although the people in my flat were okay to live with, they weren’t the people that I connected with the most. As the weeks went on, I began to purposely not socialise with them. I then quickly sorted out who I was living with for the second year. Only when it got to mid-November did I really pay attention to who was in my flat, and as it turns out, my now-best mate at uni was in my flat all along. It just took me to stop looking for my preconceived notion of what my uni friends would be, and just allow it to happen.

So don’t dismiss people that don’t dress like you, that might seem in a different tax bracket to your parents, that might go out to different things t you. University is to experience new things, allow it to happen.

Image Credits: mumsnet.com