1. The first time you meet your new friends, your mum is probably standing behind you.
She will probably express strong opinions on which drawer would be best for knickers and which would be best for socks.
2. Your parents then give you an emotional goodbye, and make you promise to call them.
And please eat the occasional vegetable.
3. And then you're on your own and you realise that you have to talk to new people or you'll be on your own forever.
Shit.
4. Before braving meeting new people you hang up some fairy lights and pictures of your old friends.
So your new friends think you're cool.
5. After psyching yourself up for a while it's time to finally meet the people you will be forced to live with for the next year.
You will probably have an awkward conversation where everyone asks each other what they got in their A-levels.
6. People insist on asking each other what school they went to even though no one will have heard of any school more than a mile away from their house.
Apart from two posh kids who will then discover that they went to the same pony camp and are actually second cousins twice removed.
7. Then there are awkward talks by overenthusiastic people from the year above known as "fresher reps".
They wear matching T-shirts and tell you where you can get condoms for free. They then give you (or more likely force you to buy) slightly different matching T-shirts and encourage you to get drunk later in the union bar.
8. They definitely assure you that your college/halls/campus/university is the best and you're going to have the best time of your life.
It's kind of overwhelming.
9. Then finally it's time to get drunk, and you will get really drunk.
You're nervous, you're not that used to being able to legally buy alcohol, and there is a lot of cheap alcohol available. It's a terribly glorious combo.
10. The alcohol pushes you over the awkward A-levels chat and you start to get to know your new best friends.
Or start to realise you need to meet some new people, stat.
11. You meet 1,000 people and remember no names.
You struggle with the people on your floor, and you can forget about knowing anyone else's name until at least second term.
12. The next day you have to get up early to do some boring stuff about registering for university, or learning about fire alarms.
You will be deathly hungover and it will feel like hell. This is the theme for freshers' week.
13. You go to freshers' fair and sign up to literally everything.
You'll get loads of free cup cakes and crappy T-shirts, and you'll end up getting emails from canoe club for the whole three years.
14. At some point you develop a crush on one of those overenthusiastic fresher reps.
It's all about their mild authority.
15. There is a lot of drunk vomiting.
Someone will vomit all over your shared loo and not clean it up, it will be a scandal, and you'll never find out who it was, but there'll be a lot of ~theories~.
16. Someone loses their virginity.
And then they probably become that weird freshers couple that then stays together for way too long.
17. And someone else definitely breaks up with their school sweetheart in the first week.
After cheating on them by snogging five different people in one night.
18. People who have done gap years make a point of how they feel like they're much older than everyone else.
And they bond with each other about their travels until they realise they have nothing else to talk about.
19. You make a friend who you think is a good candidate for your uni-BFF and then they turn out to be awful.
You realise on your third night out with them that they are not the one for you, and you have to do a friendship U-turn.
20. Around the third day something weird happens and it's no longer OK to talk to everyone.
Everyone feels it in the air, and suddenly the cliques form.
21. You live off pizza.
If you're in catered halls you might be a bit luckier, but if you're self-catered you probably won't eat a vegetable in your first week.
22. It feels like an endurance race.
There is so much drinking, so much nervous energy, and so little sleep. Freshers' week is not for the faint hearted.
23. Lots of people get ill.
Freshers' flu is real and it is dangerous. It's what happens when loads of young people from different areas of the country all snog each other without eating any vegetables.
24. It is intense.
You might have the best week of your life, and meet your closest friends. Or you might find the whole thing mildly traumatic.
25. Whatever happens, you eventually find your feet at university and everything becomes normal again.
Freshers' week is terrifying, but the good thing is that you probably won't remember it.
