Before I came to university, I had heard plenty about the infamous ‘Freshers’ Week’. Freshers’ week refers to the first week (or few days) of university, during which a series of social events are planned by student groups to help first years, or freshers, mingle.
I had seen all my brother’s pictures from his freshers’ week at Newcastle, and heard about the foam parties, bar crawls and random fancy dress events. Freshers’ week was sold to me as ‘organised fun’ that would be an interesting yet essential part of my university experience. I expected it to be where I would make my first and best friends, bond with everyone that I lived with, and consume copious amounts of alcohol that I knew I would later regret. Although I was nervous, the prospect of complete independence, with what seemed like no rules, excited me.
Luckily, I had made a few friends before I started university. At my college interview, I had met and befriended Alex, who had also got a place; he became my first friend – and eventually one of my best friends in those three years. We relied on each other for sanity in exam season and lifted each other up when the work got relentless. But Alex wasn’t the only friend I had been lucky enough to meet before university. Chelsea and I have a cute love story too. At a careers event for ‘high-achieving’ black students in the weeks before we started university, I got busy networking with black students headed to universities across the country. On the way home, a group of us girls walked to the tube station together. Chelsea was one of them, and we began to talk about how scared we were to start Cambridge. We swapped numbers, as she was getting on the tube in the other direction, and for the next few days, we made plans ahead of freshers’ week. We planned outfits, discussed where we were going to find plantain and looked for Cambridge hairstylists that could help us touch up our braids during term time.
But five days before I was due to start university, disaster struck. I was home alone in the kitchen. I had made a pot of jollof rice and another pot of chicken stew. After seeing a good deal on plantain outside West Croydon station, I said to myself, why not fry some plantain on the side? I got a bit excited in the kitchen, and whacked the whole pan of blazing hot oil and plantain onto both of my thighs. After waiting two hours for an ambulance, my neighbour put me in a cab to A&E with bad subdermal burns. The doctors ordered that I was to be in and out of hospital for two weeks. I managed to hobble up to Cambridge and into university for my college matriculation photo and a sexual consent workshop. But for the most part, my highly anticipated freshers’ week was cancelled. I was distraught.
As it turned out, apparently I didn’t miss much.
[Freshers’ week was] everything that I could imagine but ten times worse. – Kenya
I remember I cried. Loads. I was super, super worried about friends. I really didn’t meet many people that I thought I got on really well with. – Micha
Oh my gosh, the memory of freshers’ week makes me feel sick. It was objectively one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through in my entire life. – Renée
I went out once, came back really early and have never been to a party again. – Adaobi
During freshers’ week, some people have fun. Everyone else puts on a brave face and acts like they’re having fun. Most people are terribly homesick, struggling to deal with their newfound independence, missing their old friends who are now spread to all four corners of the country, and surrendering themselves to an experience that for the most part is terribly awkward. In student forums online, many students will tell you that freshers’ week is filled with ‘lots of booze and sex’ – and just as many will tell you that this is an overplayed stereotype and really isn’t the case. Either way, most students agree that they only made their real friends in the weeks that followed.
However, even in those weeks afterwards, I personally still found it quite hard to settle into university. To try and fit in, and to catch up on missing freshers’ week, I found myself engaging in habits that were very unlike me, simply because it felt as if that was what everyone else at university was doing. I would go to clubs with music that I hated and hang around the smoking areas (though I don’t even smoke), having really long conversations with strangers in the freezing cold. Then I would head back to college, stinking of smoke and battling a cough. Nothing about it was enjoyable for me, but I would do it again and again, because I was led to believe that was the only way people were making friends. After weeks of this uncomfortable ritual, I still felt really lonely. It wasn’t that the people I met weren’t nice – but I just didn’t think that they were my kind of people. I was looking for all the other black girls that I could stick to, who would stick up for me, and who would tell me that they could relate to what I was feeling. I remember telling my friends from home that I could die in my room and no one would know for days. I didn’t feel that I had met anyone who genuinely cared about me.
Imposter syndrome, and the broader feeling that you are inadequate, is something that most students will experience in the early days. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, the psychologists who coined the term, describe it as the ‘internal experience of intellectual phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement’.1 While imposter syndrome is something that most students feel to some degree, you suffer from it uniquely when you are also made to stand out by your status as a racial minority. Your feeling like an ‘imposter’ is made visible, reinforced by the relative absence of people who look like you. A 2013 study by a group of American psychologists revealed that feelings of stress and minority-related depression in education were highest in black students. It’s only in hindsight that I can understand that I was dealing with something similar. I was constantly censoring myself, having to be someone else in order to have a chance of being accepted. I felt that in order to thrive in this new university space, I would have to leave my full self – my black self – at the door. Only later would I realise how much of an emotional toll this had taken on me.
While it’s common for those dealing with imposterism to struggle alone and in silence, I would learn from the friends I later made that I was not the only one feeling this, and that many had it worse than I did. These feelings of imposterism and minority-related depression manifest even more for black working-class students, who are marginalised by both their racial and class identities.
When I got to university, it was the task of juggling a sense of belonging in a very middle-to-upper-class higher education system and still existing in a working-class home that completely threw me. – Chelsea.
While Chelsea was struggling on a student loan that almost always fell short every term, she would overhear other students talking about how they had spent over £600 in a month on brunch. For her, class was as significant an obstacle as race when it came to settling in. It exacerbated her experience of imposter syndrome, and she found herself retreating from university and college life.
If you’ve never really left a big city before, you may be surprised to discover that very few places in the UK have the same level of diversity as London, Manchester or Birmingham. Moving far away may mean that you’re separated from those aspects of your culture that were so central to your life before university. To make up for the friends I had not made at Cambridge, I found myself going back to London (I will personally fight anyone who tells me Croydon is not in London) every week or two to see my old friends. I constantly felt the need to escape, to be in spaces where I could be my full self, not whatever weird version of myself I was trying to be in those early days at university.
At last, one evening in my second term, I had a long conversation with three people who would go on to become some of my best friends at university. After that conversation, I cried – and then called my mum, telling her that I had found my people, that for the first time I felt that if I died in my room, these were people who would care enough to check up on me. It was at this point that I felt I had finally settled in.