I found that I got on far better with other people from another student society, as those on my course seemed to be constantly switching who/what their alliances were.
I found that I got on far better with other people from another student society, as those on my course seemed to be constantly switching who/what their alliances were.
Interested to know how you started at 17?
In Scotland you can do this - I gained the necessary qualifications through the Scottish Higher exams which are typically passed when aged 16/17 one yeat after the more traditional O Levels / O Grades.
The school had the option then (mid 1980s) to do something called 6th Year Studies) which was the equivelant to the English A Levels but a bit more elective - the H Grades were of a high enough standard that the universities around the UK accepted them (I also had an offer to Cambridge but elected to go to a uni nearer home).
So a lot of Scottish students could go to uni 1 year before their English counterparts. I don't know if this is still the case.
Not a lot of fun. No more school bullying but plenty of gossiping and back biting. I didn't know how to handle courting, which made for some difficult situations. I didn't know for example what one boy meant when he said he loved me, as he hardly knew me! Some creepy men hit on me thinking I might be easy prey as I ways seemed to be on my own, but did some dodgy religious group, but I won't tolerate being manipulated or blackmailed emotionally in that way.
Part of my course involved visiting Italy but the first time there were predators everywhere of different nationalities. The second time I stayed with a kind family whom I am still in touch with, though the mother sadly has dementia now and is very ill.. My exchange student in the third year in Italy was latin racist who soon told me she would be a host but never a friend as she decided English people were cold and detached, and she and her friends bitched a lot about me. I made friends with a girl who I now suspect was bipolar, who lived with a landlady who was still very pro Mussolini, and they both came out with some pretty bigoted things.
In my last year I got into a bad depression, as socially things weren't going well, could not sleep due to too much navel gazing about the true self or soul, and after another troubled soul kept playing on all my deep dark fears about killing off your ego.
I did finish with what one tutor predicted would be a mediocre degree. I didn't really like a the quoting and dryness od the scholarship way. The degree only became useful once I got the Tesol qualification fifteen years later and I got out of the UK.
I started at 17
So did I but unlike Ian I was terrible at making friends especially with the opposite sex. I was too scared of rejection and was hopeless with social signals. I made only one friend and a few acquaintances. I hated being away from home but stuck into the work which I found easyish on the whole. I got good results but I look back and wonder if only but that was a very long time ago.
Although I was never allowed to attend Uni and made to (bullied into) go into my first supermarket retailing job at 16, I am grateful for that experience, because about 10-15 years before Covid, my store started taking on a number of university students - the real and unofficial power dynamic in any supermarket is usually ran by a “coven” of women of a certain age, along with their daughters and nieces that they always somehow manage to get hired and these women know “what’s what” behind the scenes (it’s similar with the blokes in the supermarket too) and these women always said (perhaps initially motivated by bitterness and jealousy) that these university students were deemed to have no practical life skills, but as time went on, this turned out to be correct - then after my redundancy in 2019 after 17 years and when Covid hit, we started to hear some real horror stories about students dropping out of their courses despite being saddled with huge debts, stuck in their barren rooms, attending online lectures, separated from their families, then in came the supermarkets, offering them full time roles in stores nearer to their families, far beyond just getting them to switch courses to supermarket relevant courses as they had done before Covid - the other weird thing that happened during Covid was that the supermarkets started taking on airport staff, pilots, cabin crew and aircraft engineers to work on checkouts in supermarkets and many of them stayed in these roles after Covid, as the supermarkets were rejecting previously trained staff with previous experience, which seemed totally bizarre - this alone caused huge problems with travel delays, disruptions and cancellations after Covid as many potential staff could not be recruited due to long Covid, where airlines and airports really struggled and the competition for supermarket jobs became ever fiercer - I worked briefly in a new-build hotel for just over a year as kitchen Porter and public areas cleaner until it became too much, as I had also been doing volunteering work in a community grocer just after Covid (out of genuine human concern for those I was helping, I privately found this heartbreaking after I very quickly realised what was happening to people as they told us their stories)
Overall, I hated it. The work was not the problem, that felt pretty simple to me and I did well in all my exams, even got a distinction at graduation. Every other facet of university life I couldn't stand though, I couldn't fit into any social group and had no idea what to do. I would spend nearly all my time alone, but I would actively avoid people, like I would sit in the corner table in the food hall as far away from everyone else as possible. I made one friend in second year which gave me just enough stability to not fall apart and look forward to something, but I didn't want to give up on my degree course since it factored into my career plans and it cost a lot of money for my parents so I would have hated looking like I was ungrateful.
I am an exact contemporary of Chris Packham and likewise did a zoology degree. I found that I did not make any real friends with the people on my course, but I lived all three years in a traditional, catered, hall of residence, where I made a group of good friends numbering about half a dozen. This is the only time in my life that I had so many friends at the same time. My course was quite heavy on the organised taught time, with lectures, practical classes in labs and tutorials amounting to 24 hours a week. I also found that quite a challenge. I found that I could not gauge what lecturers wanted from me, I would put huge effort into something and get a 3rd or poor 2:2, or rush something at the last minute and get a 1st! Exams in huge halls with lots of other nervous people were very nerve-wracking and the anxiety that mounted in me before exams seriously affected my ability to revise effectively. We had a lot of quite smelly and grisly dissections, they were usually in the afternoon, so I would anaesthetise myself with beer at the students' union at lunchtime.
I had zero success with the opposite sex. I realise now that this was because I just could not read expressions and body language, so never recognised when I was being given a green light. In the absence of being able to recognise any interest from any young woman, I was too afraid of rejection, or of doing something inappropriate, that I never made any advances whatsoever.
Interested to know how you started at 17?
My first year was a load of fun - I started at 17 so had the excitment of drinking while underage and had no end of fun encounters with the opposite sex. About the only downside was having to study - I was masking like mad and socialising (not being too successful overall) and having fun discovering myself.
I was staying in the Uni halls of residence so was pretty much on the doorstep of the uni.
I had to resit 1 exam and after that I got a bit more serious in my second year but found a group of friends who were quite varied but entertaining. I did a lot better that year.
My third year I had to move in with my granmother because I no longer qualified for accommodation and I now had a 2.5 hour commute which, in combination with being away from my friends led me to lose interest in the whole thing - without the social life it was all dull as dishwater.
I eventually stopped going in, didn't do well enough in the exams to go on for Honours but got a good enough result to still pass.
Just talking to people was what got me into the habit of making friends - breaking the ice and finding a shared interest often helped.
As for the cliques, I largely ignored them and found people much more on my wavelength to talk to.
University was a pretty traumatic experience for me.
I spent the entire time alone. I went to lectures and tutorials alone. I waited outside lecture halls alone. I had lunch alone. I studied alone.
All while surrounded by people who were not alone.
I honestly don’t know how I managed to graduate.
Chris Packham did some videos about uni in which he said the only person he’d talk to all day was the bus driver in the morning.
I loved uni, I made loads of friends, all younger than me and many younger than my kids. I loved the work and got on really well with most of my lecturers
So my Uni story is a bit of a funny one...
My Degree was very Neurodiverse in terms of who was studying it. Our Course Lead said there was an over 50% rate of people being Autistic on my course, and frankly, I am inclined to believe him. Cliques were present, but not overly common, and there weren't many "rivalries" to speak of. Most people who stuck around to the third year were just cracking on with the work, and they were all positive/friendly towards me with the odd exception.
Early on into my Uni career I did join the D&D society and was fairly involved in it for the first year, but I drifted off from it over time. I still have a lot of online-only friends I made indirectly through that society so it wasn't a waste; life just had different priorities I suppose.
At the point I got to University I was at the stage in my life where I wanted to get my Degree and move onto whatever came next. I wasn't really as concerned with making friends there as I might have been if I was younger.
