The first day at university

At the moment, friends with children are posting up those ‘first day back at school’ photographs; among them, the ‘first day at Big School’ photograph. Smartly dressed, posed, but with the parental tension fizzing from the screen. And after Big School, there’s Very Big School – further or higher education. A friend I met in my undergraduate days has reminded me that it’s 40 years since we started our degrees. She’s right, although it’s hard to believe, and I’m trying to remember what it felt like.

I suppose we were fairly unusual in that we both lived at home and commuted in on public transport, although we certainly weren’t alone in that; I soon found someone else on my course who was even on the same train line as me. We were at University College London, the location of which made commuting an option, plus in those distant days you could claim your fares and be reimbursed by the Department of Education. We never felt homesick: we lived at home! When visiting new friends from my course in their tiny rooms in vast halls of residence, I was perfectly happy with my decision not to join them there.

I was also unusual in that I’d taken a gap year and spent it working in a bookshop. Among other benefits, this meant I already owned most of the key books, bought on my staff discount. I’d done lots of the recommended pre-course reading, and was most definitely ready to get on with some serious study. I’d found and chosen my course for myself, applied and been accepted for it: it felt right. I suspect it can be very different if you end up somewhere other than your original choice, although from years of teaching students in precisely that position I remember many who settled in so well that you would never have suspected this wasn’t their ‘Plan A’ at all. I also suspect it feels different if you don’t really want to do the degree course on which you find yourself; a student I once taught was doing Classics but really wanted to do Arboriculture/Forestry, and eventually dropped out in order to follow his dream.

I remember that autumn of 1977 as an ‘Indian Summer’, and apparently it was very warm. People who’d come to London with a car-load of clothes for the term were often over-dressed for the unexpected heat. Most students were also very smartly dressed, I was surprised to find, although their standards rapidly slipped. I don’t remember the Freshers’ Week experience of club/society stalls and endless alcohol, possibly because I was living at home and keeping up with friends there, possibly because the Week wasn’t yet the experience it later became. Or possibly because I was a swot. I was genuinely excited about learning new things and reading more books.

I did a joint degree and the Social Anthropology half of it began with a few days spent at a residential conference centre in Windsor Great Park. There were lectures introducing the subject, and lots of opportunities to bond, not least when sharing the less-than-exciting meals and counting out the frozen peas so that they were fairly distributed. I don’t remember much about the dorms, which would have been only my second experience of such a sleeping arrangement – the first was the Girls’ Public Day School Trust cruise when I was 14. I do remember going out with a group at dawn to walk in the park, and seeing the mist hanging low over the ground, so I suspect I didn’t get much sleep.

Once that induction was over, I think I settled very quickly into a routine. I liked lectures and seminars; I found a friend who, like me, brought a packed lunch, and we sat together to eat most days. I developed a little world, shaped by my timetable and physically bounded by libraries and bookshops. It extended to the Royal Anthropological Institute and its cinema. I worked out the level of analysis needed in my essays, and discovered how much time to spend on writing each one, and gradually found that I could produce something good enough in less time than I’d expected. I learned to work ‘smart’ as well as ‘hard’, how to narrow down a reading list to the key items, when to read around a subject and when to focus on one topic in depth. I learned how to use travelling time effectively. I explored opportunities to take classes which weren’t part of my degree, and discovered who were the best teachers in terms not only of having a clear lecturing style but also their willingness to go off on interesting tangents.

I settled in quickly, but in some ways, I now realise, I didn’t settle at all. As a commuter, I was never completely engaged in the full student experience. Going to university was more like a 9-5 job for me only, after a year of really working 9-5, the relative freedom of a university lecture timetable was a release. I have no particular issue with any of that; it was just how it was for me. I loved what I did. Emotionally, socially, I had a lot of growing up yet to do, most of which happened in my first year of PhD study when I spent some months living in a hall of residence in Paris.

Is there any message from this? I suppose it could be that your experience of ‘going to university’ isn’t necessarily the same as anyone else’s experience, and that’s fine. There isn’t just one way of doing it. That applies even more, of course, to Open University students, who aren’t ‘going’ anywhere physically. Looking back, I think my commuting to university was somewhere intermediate between the standard living-in-halls experience and the OU experience. It was right for me; for the person I was then.