As I reflect on my transition from school to university, I can vividly remember my first experience in the vast XLG2 lecture theatre, located in University College London’s sullen brutalist chemistry building, which seated over 300 students. I walked in alongside a stream of fellow new students and surveyed the steeply stepped rows of seats from the back of the room, weighing up the merits of different seating options: not too far back (the lecturer would be a speck), not at the front (I’d have to crane my neck to read the projected slides). Within just a few minutes, the lecturer explained how, owing to the number of students on the introductory biology module, the class had been split into two, with the other half due to receive the same lecture at a different time in the week (that’s a lot of students!).

 

It didn’t take many weeks into term for the turn-out to rapidly fall off. Lectures are notoriously under attended, particularly the en-mass kind typical of the first few years of STEM university courses. The lectures can be up to two hours of one-sided talking, with the most awake students frantically taking notes without pausing to consider the material being delivered, making ambitious mental notes to research something in more detail after class.

 

While the hectic and difficult nature of the transition from secondary school to university-style teaching is widely known about and near-universally experienced, this doesn’t make the reality of undergoing that transition any less bewildering and at times lonely. There are a few aspects to this transition that have been researched in detail, including course material, learning style and forming personal connections.

 

My degree featured a notorious first term maths module, which was saved only by an enigmatic and sometimes comically passionate (and sassy) lecturer. It was intensive and started most students’ weeks off with a Monday morning lecture that left them feeling at best drained, and at worst utterly bewildered. I distinctly remember struggling to grasp imaginary numbers, while my peers nonchalantly recounted having covered them in A level further maths.

 

It is common for some students to feel left behind in the first year and overwhelmed by unexpectedly challenging material. This feeling can be exasperated if you seem to be surrounded by course mates moaning about how they covered all of this in their A levels. Both of these are perfectly natural experiences, and consequences of conundrum faced by organisers and designers of first year university courses: how to format the course in a way that ensures everyone begins subsequent years adequately equipped and on the same page, while not wasting too many students’ time on material they are already familiar with. While I may not have covered imaginary numbers, I was already fairly proficient at integrals, which some other students had never encountered.

 

This problem may appear easily solvable by introducing more specific entry criteria, to ensure that students begin courses with as similar secondary school experiences as possible. However, such a solution could end up alienating many potential students and rendering university courses too inaccessible. For example, many psychology degrees’ first year content overlaps significantly with that of an A level psychology course, leaving A level psychology students frustrated by the repetition. Most psychology degrees don’t require applicants to have taken A level psychology. If they did, access would be limited to students in schools that offer A level psychology, which is not that widely available.

 

To add to that a more personal opinion, student’s are already required to carefully make fairly stressful decisions about future careers when they choose their A levels, usually limited to only 3 to 5 subjects. If universities start requiring ever more specialised A levels, this only pushes forward high-impact decisions onto younger students with more uncertainty about which path they want to pursue.

 

Research shows that another major factor in first year students’ wellbeing is a feeling of belonging, both to the university as a whole as well as their home department. It’s important to form meaningful connections with fellow students, academic and teaching staff. Of course, most students recognise this need, and worrying about failing to meet it can further enhance anxiety. It can easily feel like everyone has already solidified BFF relationships within two weeks of freshers while you only know 2 people by name from your physiology lecture and haven’t gelled with anyone on your sports team yet.

 

I have only a handful of friends now who it later transpired were in that same biology lecture, and I didn’t meet them serendipitously by sitting next to them and sharing a pen. I met them much later, through various friend-of-a-friend scenarios. The first WhatsApp exchange between me and the first friend I made at university discusses us arranging to meet outside the chemistry building after our respective lectures. I met her at a chemistry careers event, which I wasn’t that interested in, in a room I nearly didn’t find.

 

During my first year, I took an introductory psychology module, during the introductory first lecture of which the lecturer jovially explained how vast bodies of research demonstrate that block lectures with no opportunity for seminar-style feedback and discussion followed by a single memorisation exam is by far the least effective mode to learn. That same psychology module comprised a single two-hour lecture each week from January to March, with a single 2.5 hour essay exam in May for assessment.

 

Many first year students are taken by surprise by the shift to a more independent learning style. The emphasis placed in secondary schools and A level courses in particular on “cookbook learning”, memorising keywords and preempting mark-schemes, makes this transition even more stark. Not only does teaching become less personal, with tiny lecturer-to-student ratios and limited office hours, but the emphasis on critical evaluation and analysis may be unfamiliar to many students. Fortunately, most universities recognise this and provide modules, compulsory or otherwise, to address the change.

 

The aforementioned WhatsApp friend once sent me the following text, during a stressful week in first year “I skipped my tutorial. My life is descending into chaos”. We laugh exceptionally hard at this message looking back, partly because it manages to capture in such a relatable way a very real experience that in the moment can feel overwhelming and isolating, even ashaming. The transition to university life is bound to derail our perception of our own work ethic and characteristics. Skipping a tutorial after months of diligent attendance, while hilariously trivial to a seasoned and adjusted student, felt to my friend at the time like an ultimate and irreversible crumbling of the discipline and routine around which she had tried to define her university-self.

 

There is no easy quick fix to the feelings of upheaval that accompany many first-year university experiences, because adapting and adjusting are processes that take care and time. In the same way that it is unwise to attempt to cram an entire year’s worth of academic content into 3 weeks of learning (Although many students never manage to fully internalise this wisdom, myself included), so too should you not expect a smooth and quick transition to feelings of total comfort and ease within your new environment. You’re not just learning new facts and equations, you are also learning to live new routines, surrounded by new social structures and people, a learning process which is just as valuable and difficult as writing those essays. In the meantime, be gentle and generous with yourself.