Must Do's In The First Weeks At TUOS: By Hemanshi Galaiya

It is mid-June which means that while a lot of students are stressing about A-level exams they are also secretly excited about the fact that they will be in university in the next couple of months. With each passing day, the number of exams left become fewer and the degrees of excitement are peaking…

And while university will definitely be some of the best days of your life here are some of my top tips to make sure you the most out of your first week here...
 Give it a Go

As a fresher this is a must-must! Give it a go is a series of activities that the student union pulls together each year. You can book a day trip to Cardiff or visit the Hogwarts site, you could have a taster of a new cultural society or participate in a new sport and you can participate in a variety of day trips or enjoy a concert from renowned performers.

Go to the peaks

Again, this may be one of the most talked about activities that students in Sheffield engage in but if you think it is overrated you will just miss out on one of the most exciting experiences. The peaks are incredibly assessable during the summer and in the early autumn right around the time when you will be making your way to university. There is an array of activities that you can engage in (Yes! It isn’t just about hiking). You can loan a cycle and ‘cruise’ through the scenic hills or you could picnic at a spot and light up a small BBQ with a couple of friends or even better you can camp at the peaks and all of this is just the tip of the ice berg. So remember to pack a nice pair of sporting shoes.

Bar Crawl

Whether you drink or not this is one of those activities you must indulge in. It is one of the best ways to meet new people and explore the city and its night life and to integrate yourself with the local crowd (especially on the weekends). I personally don’t drink but the mere buzz of walking around the city with a group of people and making new friends at each spot has led me into some incredible friendships. The best part is not even the drinking or the games, it is all the time you spend finding your way to new places and experiencing new environments and places to hang out in the future.

 Go on a local history walk

Ow yes! Sheffield is the ancient steel capital of the world and if you haven’t seen the local sites your time at university will have been incomplete. The orientation team pulls together a number of trips throughout the city and guides you through exciting and interesting sites. If you don’t grab this while the first week there are loads of museums that can help you get the juices of history flowing through your mind, such as, the Weston Park Museum or the Art Gallery.

 Sign up to 100’s of societies

As a fresher, we all make that mistake of signing up to almost everything that we find even remotely interesting and then we all struggle to make every meet up that comes our way. Yet, I would say go ahead and do it because this is where you will meet people who will at some point turn into friends and even family in the long run. I signed up to a number of cultural societies as I got to meet a larger portion of the international students through this. This also helped me appreciate various cultures and engaging with a variety of personas helped me develop people skills that I would have otherwise missed out on. Of course, I couldn’t cope with all the societies but experiencing a wide number of them in my earlier times at university was very rewarding. With time I filtered out a number of them and found the best ones where I fitted in well and was able to participate.

So that’s all folks. I hope this will help all those coming our way this new academic year and as a bonus, I’d say try to meet people from previous years as we love to share our ‘wisdom’ with freshers more than we love to complain about having to wash our dishes on a daily basis.