According to the OUSU website, Freshers’ Week begins at 00:00 on the 4th of October and lasts until the 10th where, at 23:00, you are presumably allowed to sleep. Your actual Freshers’ week will probably not be organised with such military precision but be grateful for it’s duration. Why? Freshers’ week is just that, a week- which may not seem worthy of note but it has only be true as of 2006 when Merton JCR became the first college to propose that it be extended from a meagre four days to a full seven, in the interests of the ‘first years’ academic and social welfare’. Whilst the motives are questionable, as most people feel anything but well at the end of their Freshers’ week, it give you more time to enjoy all the fun of university with very little responsibility – and it is just one more thing that we do better than Cambridge, they still only get four days.
Contrary to popular belief, or what your friends at home may joke about, Oxford Freshers’ week is not just library trips and chess nights – there will be so much to do, and it is fun, promise. But, all the fun hides an ulterior motive, as you start to keep your eye out for your future friends. Freshers’ week is all about meeting people and it will start to remind you of speed-dating (albeit, a little less speedy, being a week long and all). Minus the lack of speed, it does have three similarities: people look out for other people that they like the look of, everyone asks the same questions and you rarely remember the answers, but ‘Where are you from?’, ‘What are you studying?’, ‘Did you take a gap year?’ are part of the ritual, and make up the larger, and much more important question, ‘Will we be friends?’. While you may just want to write your name and subject on your forehead and be done with it, it’s important to make the effort and to answer with the same enthusiasm the 100th time, and you did for the first kind soul who asked you. Everyone will be hideously nervous and will want to find someone to buddy up with – don’t take first impressions as your only impression of someone and dismiss them and, on the opposite side of the scale, don’t decide the first person that you meet, and like, will be your Best-Friend-Forever-and-Ever – it is far too easy to do and will stop you getting to know everyone else.
Talk to everyone and don’t be embarrassed – no one ever thinks badly of the talkative, friendly girl or boy. Enjoy the lack of the Oxford stereotype – no smoking jackets or monocles here – and dispel all Oxford myths, you will have fun here. Be friendly, don’t be too choosy – say yes to everything you can apart from a suspicious looking doner from that dodgy kebab van or walking home with that predatory looking third year. Try and go to everything that your Freshers’ rep has arranged: it is far easier and less scary to stay in your room and ring home, but it is also much less fun. Even if it means you have to go somewhere on your own, do it – it will just give you more incentive to meet people.
Make sure you do the important things as well as the less important, but obviously more fun, activities. Meeting your tutors will almost certainly be on the agenda at some point, as will library inductions to the Bodleian and your faculty. Yes, they are quite dull, but you can bond with the person next to you simply with a sarcastic roll of your eyes and it also removes a lot of the intimidation that comes from walking up to a building you may have only seen on a postcard and knowing that you have to find your way around it. It will make your first week a whole lot easier because you will actually know how to take a book out and where your subject books are. Dull, but necessary.
The Freshers’ Fair is one of the more sensible arranged activities that is actually quite good fun – mostly because it will be spent signing up the rugby player you met into the Ballet society, or your new buddy into the Medieval Battle Enactment Society, and then watching for the rest of the term as they receive copious amounts of emails that they have no interest in. Whatever you want to do, it will be here – if you are into your sport, music or drama then take note of audition and trial times, it’s much easier to get into these things straight away, rather than working up the courage halfway through the term, and they are great places to meet people out of college.
The non-drinking activities are actually the best places to meet people and your college Freshers’ rep should lay on some activities during the day to drag you sleepy-heads out of your beds. Often it’s a rather weather dependent BBQ outside (everyone still thinks it’s summer when they get back…) which invariably starts much later than advertised, but it’s a chance to talk to more people and to delve a little deeper than the classic Fresher week questions. Don’t be afraid to ask someone’s name again – everyone forgets and it is far, far more awkward to ask him or her in the middle of 4th week. If you’re too embarrassed then a little revising of your college fresher group on Facebook never hurt. Your Fresher rep might also arrange a treasure hunt, or a photo quiz, that will take you round Oxford. These are great fun and will help you find your way around, although Oxford doesn’t take long to get to know. Make a mental note of the fancy dress shop, you’ll need far more than you would expect during your Oxford career, particularly for college bops.
Ah, bops. This is oxford slang for an Entz rep organized party, ‘Entz’ is the oxford slang for the two people in charge of your nightlife for a term. Oxford slang is quite confusing at first, and may seem at times to venture into the realms of Clockwork Orange – you’ll check your ‘pidge’ (pigeonhole) in the ‘plodge’ (porters’ lodge), will sign ‘up’ and ‘down’ at the start and end of term – but everyone will be just in the dark as you are, and then suddenly, you’ll be using it and thinking nothing of it.
And that sudden change sums Oxford up. Freshers’ week will be overwhelming and there will be times when you think that you don’t belong, when you think it was all just a clerical blunder that meant you found your way in, but then suddenly you will have a group of friends and will feel at home. On the Sunday night of 1st week, before the actual work begins, and when you have finally unpacked your room to make it yours, the home-sick (or is that alcohol induced?) pangs can be replaced with the knowledge that for three lots of eight weeks, for the next three or four years, feeling at home here will just get easier and easier.
