Surviving Your First Year

The Sunshine Alumni Guide · “Surviving your first year”

Congratulations: you have a place at university. Before you pack, here is what we wish someone had told us. We are three former Sunshine International students — Anna in Edinburgh, Sam in Toronto and Lucy in Melbourne — and between us we have made almost every mistake possible.
1. Lectures are not the whole course. At school, if you went to every lesson, you were doing well. At university, you might have only twelve hours of lectures a week, and new students often misunderstand this as free time. It isn’t. For every hour in a lecture hall, you are expected to spend two or three hours reading and preparing on your own. The students who fall behind are usually not the least intelligent ones; they are the ones who underestimated how much independent study was needed.
2. Tutorials are where you learn. Lectures can have three hundred people in them, but tutorials are small groups of eight or ten. You are expected to have read the material and to come up with your own questions. Sam admits that he stayed silent for his first five tutorials because he was afraid of saying something wrong. “Nobody cares if you are wrong,” he says now. “They care if you have nothing to say.”
3. Deadlines are not suggestions. At school, a teacher might give you an extra day if you asked nicely. At university, work handed in late often loses marks automatically, and some departments refuse to accept it at all. Lucy keeps one calendar with every deadline for the whole term on it and works backwards from each one. It is not exciting, but it works.
4. Feeling overwhelmed is normal. Almost everyone has a bad week in October, when the novelty has worn off and the work suddenly piles up. If you are struggling, talk to someone early: your tutor, a student adviser or the student support service. Universities are much better at helping students who ask in week four than students who ask in week twelve.
5. Failing one exam is not the end of the world. Anna failed a statistics exam in her first year and was convinced she would be thrown out. Instead, she was offered a resit in August, passed comfortably and now helps other students with statistics. Most universities allow you to retake a failed module, so do not panic — but do not rely on it either.
6. Keep up with the things that keep you sane. Join one club in your first month, even if you are busy. Sport, music, volunteering, anything. You will meet people outside your course, and you will have a reason to stop working, which is more important than it sounds.
7. Learn to manage money before you arrive. Rent, food and books add up faster than you expect, and running out of money in November is surprisingly common. Sam kept a simple spreadsheet of everything he spent in his first month and was shocked to discover how much went on takeaway coffee. A budget is not exciting either, but it means you can say yes to the things that matter, like a weekend trip with new friends.
Finally, remember that a degree is not only a qualification. It is three or four years in which you learn to organise your life, depend on yourself and succeed in things nobody is checking. That might be the most educational part of all.