The Missed Fresher Experience
Carousel Featured OpinionPublished October 25, 2008 at 17:20 4 CommentsWithout university already being daunting enough, imagine 3 days before the date you are due to move, you still have no accommodation. Well that was the reality for me and 40 others, who were told 48 hours before the rest of the university freshers’ were due to move, that our accommodation was not ready and we would be put in a hotel. Immediately logging onto Facebook to see if I could find any other unfortunate people in my predicament, I was faced with the dozens of posts from people announcing that they were in Beaumont or John Fosters, and even those staying in Mary Gee seemed to be showing off in front of me because they actually had a stable roof over their head.
One girl in the Holiday Inn even travelled down from Newcastle, only to be told that the office had contacted home earlier that day and they had obviously missed it due to travelling down. Why didn’t you just find private accommodation, I hear you cry? Personally, I didn’t want to give up hope on the Halls of Residence front, adamant that the accommodation office would see fit to put me into a spare closet of some sort. I was determined to get the full-fresher experience that everyone except us seems to boast of.
So, just like every other student I travelled down on the Sunday, complete with heavy suitcases and boxes, anxious about the predicament I am in. Although, seemingly, I wasn’t like any other typical student- whereas other people would be getting to know each other in their halls, the group of us staying at the Holiday Inn were left to settle in, as best we could, into a hotel room. Of course the place was nice, and you can probably imagine the university having organised us to stay in some hostel in the middle of town.
Fourteen days of staying in the Holiday Inn and we were moving to a building of flats that had been refurbished to the highest standard, in the centre of town. Does a simple 20 minute walk to the university and a permanent address mean the accommodation office should get off lightly? I’m not convinced. For the first week in the Holiday Inn, none of us had a clue what was going on, with rumours going left, right and centre that we could be living in our hotel room until Christmas.
Equally, none of us were told about spare rooms in Halls of Residence, which meant we could have moved sooner. Now that we are all living on Upper Brown Street, and paying £4000 per annum for a self-catered, brand-new flat, I can hardly boast about having had the proper experience that so many have. In my opinion, no amount of cooked breakfasts, double beds, suave loggings and cleaners can amount for this not being the university experience I and many others, signed up for.
Natalie Sanderson
I have nothing but sympathy for every single fresher that had to weather this particular storm.
As an after-thought, like most things on a Monday morning, don’t you find it strange that this happened whilst the University still has the College Hall site on its hands. Surely there is a lesson to be learnt there?
It’s primarily about their ‘child in the sweet shop’ way of handling a doubled tuition fee since their introduction in 2006. Demand has proven to not show any effects to the pricing, and they have taken on way too many students by virtue of greed it seems. It irritates me… the other day around the coffee shop there were people trying to eat a jacket potato standing up, due to lack of spacing. Im not suggesting that this is to do with the number of students – more likely due to the lunchtime rush, but it is evident that the university is not well equipped enough for larger numbers. Even the library is a struggle these days – and each and every individual deserves the resources that each person is paying thousands of pounds for.
Its a struggle to find a computer or desk now; I can’t begin to imagine what its going to be like during exams. I wonder if they have thought about this and are attempting to fix it before the problem gets out of hand, or if, like they did with the halls of residence fiasco, they will just bury their heads in the sand and attempt to (poorly) deal with the aftermath?