Freshers Week is perhaps one of the most bizarre yet brilliant weeks of your life. You arrive in Leeds slightly nervous but excited. You make your way to your halls with a car full of all your stuff, find your room, and finally see the home where you will be spending the next year of your life. This is it. The start of your new Uni life. And thus the journey begins.

The next step is meeting the people you will be living with for the next year (and perhaps even longer than that if you end up really liking them/not wanting to throttle them!) A few words of advice; go on all nights out, get to know as many people in your halls as you can, and try not to judge a book by it’s cover, because from experience, first impressions are often wrong. Your new best friend might just be that crazy person tearing up the dancefloor who you’d never normally approach. Prepare to be surprised.

Then there are the multitude of course events; countless welcome talks, faculty events and society events. Go to everything offered to you. That way, you’ll know everything there is to know about your course, your school and your societies, and that is (mainly) a good thing. It is also really important to make friends on your course, especially if, like me, you don’t have many contact hours. These events give you the chance to meet loads of new people. I met a few of my closest course mates at these events in Freshers week, and you can too. But not if you’ve become a nocturnal creature, as tempting as that prospect sounds. You’ve just got to go out and talk to people, man!

You will also be encouraged to go to the society fairs, and you seriously should. Walking around, you will see so many different types of clubs and societies. There will be ones that interest you, ones that really don’t, and ones that you have never even heard of. Anyone for boxercise? Societies are massive fun and besides, you can’t just put ‘nursing massive hangovers’ in the interests section of your CV. Just make sure you sign up to anything you might be interested in because if you’re not on the mailing list, you won’t find out information about the society. And no one likes to miss out.

Freshers (and second and third years!), have an amazing week. Get involved, try everything and anything. You’ll never get another week in your academic life that’s designed for you to indulge in so many opportunities. You’ll probably go out more, and have less sleep, than you do on holiday.  So enjoy it; have fun! Like you need telling, you crazy bunch.