Having the right expectations for your first year experience is hugely important to getting the most out of your time as a fresher, so make sure you take the time to think about what it is you want to get out of the year.
When I started at Warwick in September 2020, I had deliberately set my expectations so low as to be non-existent. Already 6 months into a pandemic, I decided that the only way to appreciate first year would be to assume that circumstances meant things couldn’t be any better anyway. Now this mindset had its advantages: it certainly helped me through isolation when I caught Covid in the first week of term, and it made the boredom of November’s lockdown easier to bear. However, going in with low expectations also made me complacent - instead of looking for the best experience possible and throwing myself into my degree, societies, or friendship groups I found myself drifting. The same attitude to uni life that had helped during freshers’ week had, by the end of my first term, stopped me from finding the people and experiences I needed to feel fulfilled.
None of this is to say that going into first year with particularly high expectations would have been any better. In fact, many of my close friends struggled hugely with the gap between the idea of university they had been promised on open days and in fiction and the reality of actually getting to uni. I know people that came very close to dropping out of first year entirely because they felt that their experience didn’t live up to their (sky-high) expectations. When moving into such a drastically different stage of life, setting your expectations too high can easily suck the fun out of the great experiences you do have.
As I got further into my first year, I realised that it was ok to want more from both my life and Warwick itself. Understanding that expectation management didn’t just mean accepting anything led to me seeking out more meaningful friendships and more things to do with my time. Those goals were in part met because I began to expect that the university deliver on its promises to keep students safe, joining the Protect Warwick Women protest group and meeting some of the best people I know.
Ultimately, having a good set of expectations made university somewhere that I was happy to be. I learned to accept that sometimes things go wrong without accepting the bad things that can be changed.
Everyone’s priorities are different, and the things or people that made me happy in first year wouldn’t have suited someone else. So the point of this blog is not to tell you which specific things you should or shouldn’t expect from first year; rather it’s to say that the most important thing you can do before coming to uni is to spend some time thinking about what it is you want to get from the experience without getting carried away by the idea that life at university will be a fun paradise 100% of the time (it won’t). Taking those things and setting them as expectations going in will make sure that you get everything you can out of your time as a fresher, without leaving you open to disappointment.
---- Caleb Avis, Men’s Officer
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