That First Term!

I will never forget the moment my door closed with a gentle click, to signify my first night as a student, as my parents left me in halls of residence on Wednesday the 18th September 2003.

It was the most deafening silence that followed as I stood quietly, somewhat shell shocked, simply watching the cheap gold plated handle as it fastened shut and opened another door onto my new life at university. There would never be another seminal moment quite like this until the day I sat my final 3rd year exam, and I remember feeling absolutely hollow with anticipation coupled with combined elements of apprehension.

But, I cannot emphasise enough, having reminisced with many friends and acquaintances from my days at Liverpool University, this feeling was perfectly normal, despite at the time seemingly making one feel totally unworthy and unprepared for the times ahead. University is perhaps one of the single most wrenching moments of an individual’s life, particularly for those who are living away from home for the first time. Even so, for those who are not, it is still a daunting prospect and I encountered many people along the way who were juggling university with a family and a full time job AND managing their own household. I salute those people. Halls of residence after all, in retrospect, were a light and easy induction into getting on with life at uni without having to worry too much about the logistics of living costs, the things that become inevitable worry factors in second year!

I had just done the meet and greet in my hall block, which was unconventional to say the least because, having moved in on an unofficial day for this building, it meant that only a few other people had had to do the same so there was no massive crowd/rush of people normally associated with such a move – incidentally I had an entire 3rd floor to myself which was very eerie with it being a strange new place, knowing there were about three other girls on the floor below and two boys on ground level all playing loud music presumably as a first masking element to make them feel at home. We had arranged to go out for a meal that night in the town center by way of getting to know each other, and mostly because we didn’t know if the catered facilities would officially begin until the next day so it was the lesser of two evils. Until then, my respite would be the television, which I planned to plug in as background noise whilst I unpacked and organized my new abode.

So back to the scene in my new room: left alone, and feeling helplessly abandoned in the moment, I turned to face my most important task – settling in. But then disaster struck. Although my bags were still heaped haphazardly about me, and the floor was strewn with various electronic components, including my laptop, my hi-fi and DVD player – my worst case possible scenario had already happened: I couldn’t get a signal on the TV. Oh. My God. Was I on Mars? You see, in such a scenario, and in such an immediate sense of isolation, television is a unique and special portal where millions of spatially separated individuals can be united electronically through the medium of broadcast and strangely it does work in making you feel like someone is with you. Straight away I was on the phone to my parents, on their way home by now, and their only solution was for me to go to the shop and buy an amplifier aerial the following day; I’m not sure what exactly I DID want them to do about the situation but somehow this just wasn’t a good enough answer, I wanted them to help me directly because psychologically I felt like I had lost a limb having lost the simple security of my childhood home forever in the space of a few hours.

I would continue to feel that jarred sensation for a good few weeks in my first year because everything had seemed to happen so fast – I had gone through the clearing process because of achieving the right grades in the wrong subjects at A-level, and the careful months of planning and selection over my choice of university had effectively amounted to nothing – I was been literally dropped in Liverpool it seemed, stunned by the rapidity of events and an understandable lack of knowledge about my new surroundings. I hadn’t even had a guaranteed room until the week before I arrived and I remember threatening on the verge of tears to defer for a year because I couldn’t bear the thought of a makeshift dormitory in the crucial first few weeks. I felt so sorry for those people in the oversubscribed halls that ended up sleeping on the common room floor like refugees until people began to feel the strain and drop out altogether – over subscription of the rooms was one of the cruellest things about those first few weeks in my opinion – the university deliberately left people without their own accommodation simply because statistics showed that so many percent would leave after week two etc, etc. and the rooms would eventually empty to accommodate those stuck in temporary beds.

Well, the first night meal out wasn’t exactly a roaring success – it was adequate but I can’t go as far as to describe it as fun; the girls either seemed neurotic, dull or shy and I couldn’t really find a sticking point with any of them, whilst the couple of boys who came with us turned out to be the usual drifter-types who had come to uni to delay getting a real job, and planned to spend their ensuing time either getting drunk or stoned. We ended up back at the campus bar, buying overpriced drinks and making small talk against a backdrop of technopop music and raucous fake laughter from other assembled clusters of new arrivals. I was bored already and hoped for a better selection in the next couple of days when our block was opened officially for the rest of the students to move in.

The next day my hopes seemed to come true – a raft of new faces were swarming around the building and I felt like a smug homemaker, having already sorted my room out, I was wafting around offering to help or provide cups of tea and I knew it was being well received because everyone came to congregate in my room afterwards, to decide where to go and what to do – from that point onwards in the first few days my bedroom was somewhat of a meeting area, and the girls on my floor seemed genuinely lovely. Until the cracks started to appear. Girls by their nature tend to be either stuck up, cliquey or just too damn girly, but I managed to find an extreme dosage within my hall – not to name any names but I remember four in particular on my floor who managed to absolutely ruin every single hall night out together with their moody bored stares, demands on where to go, and drunken catfights with each other in the early hours. They were Jekyll and Hyde characters, innocent and sweet on the one hand but at the flip of a coin absolute monsters, and it made for an unfortunate divide with the second floor of girls who felt too intimidated to mix with our group because of these schizophrenic morons with no manners or decorum to speak of.

However, in the end it was through enduring them that the rest of us pulled together in solidarity and became faster friends in first year because of it. Having said that, most of my best friends from university days were made in the second and third year, when I was less uprooted, and more resolute in knowing myself, and what I wanted. I was happy on my course, I knew what I wanted to achieve from it, and ultimately had the confidence and self-assurance to actively pursue my own goals. On the way I inevitably ended up meeting individuals whose interests meshed with mine, people who I now count amongst my closest and most valued companions, and who share some of my best memories of university life.

But that’s another story . . .