In the months leading up to moving to university, the older students I spoke to never failed to reminisce about their own first year experience. I would listen to stories about ‘the number of nights I came home at 5 a.m and the dreaded panic of finishing an essay before the deadline followed by the seemingly reassuring statement ‘don’t worry though, first-year doesn’t matter’.
By the time I arrived at uni, I was convinced first-year students were nocturnal. Now in my third year, I can confirm that, yes, this is partly true. On multiple occasions my friends and I have walked back to halls at an ungodly hour, watching the sun come up after a night out. It was a learning curve, and all part of maintaining a balanced lifestyle as a fresher.
In this article I want to set out the reasons why your first year really does matter, and how it will pay off to create a good work-life balance; a skill that becomes even more important when the pressures of employment are fast looming.
Despite the fact that most students only need to get a minimum of 40% in the first-year in order to continue their studies into second year, taking it seriously will help you realise your potential. If you reach second year never having submitted a piece of work written to the best of your ability, you will never truly know the level you are working at, until it is too late and all work counts towards your final classification. On top of that, seeing tangible progress in your grades across the first-year can really help in building up confidence and help you feel ready for second year.
Using the first year to learn core essay writing skills is crucial, I have found. It is a great opportunity to develop your own style, and get to know what examiners are really looking for without some of the pressure. Other skills such as skim reading, note taking, revision techniques, critical thinking, sitting exams and how to effectively research are in-built into most essay based modules in the first-year. These skills will serve you throughout your time at university, so students should get to grips with them sooner rather than later.
Furthermore, the effort you put into first-year can affect your interactions with lecturers. By turning in work that was cobbled together in the final hours, chances are that the feedback you receive will be limited in how nuanced and useful it is. The examiner is forced to spend more of their time addressing overt errors in a submission that could have been avoided by the student. Ultimately, more effort leads to more meaningful feedback… and hopefully a better grade. Secondly, and although I would like to think that this would not be the case, you do not want to risk asking a lecturer for advice in your second year, and then not taking you seriously because you failed to attend their lectures and seminars in your first year and only just scraped a pass in their module.
Coasting through your first year is also not ideal in terms of managing your mental health. There were several occasions in my first year when friends would push themselves to breaking point by cramming in revision and working close to deadlines. Several convinced themselves that their degree was too hard for them. In reality, they had exhausted themselves and this was having a serious impact on both their confidence and mental health. Personally, I found the best way to combat this was to create a routine. Treating uni somewhat like a 9-5 job worked for me. This may sound boring, but it allowed for plenty of free time and took the stress out of deadlines. An all too common statement from students is, “I work well under pressure”. The truth is that adrenaline fuelled work may be written quickly, but forcing yourself to perform like this is also a highly stressful way to get through university. At the heart of it, knowing you’ve tried your hardest also avoids the regret of wishing you had worked a bit harder.
Although students study their degrees for a variety of reasons, one would hope most are studying their subject because of a keen interest in it and its link to the career they wish to pursue. Even if what you are learning does not contribute to your final grade, everything you learn at university should be somewhat interesting or useful for you now or in the future; if not what are you doing it for?
And finally, no student needs reminding that university costs an absurd amount, £9,250 a year in tuition fees (and twice that for international students) leaves students thousands of pounds in debt, so why waste it? When broken down, tuition fees cost hundreds of pounds a week. So while it seems like a good idea at the time, doing the bare minimum or skipping lectures when you are hungover or fancy a lie-in is certainly not in your interest.
The new-found independence of a first-year student often means they are bound to spend their time partying, and to some extent first-year is designed to allow students to spend their time settling in and socialising. First-year students do not need to make the library their second home just yet, but it certainly helps to familiarise yourself with its offerings.
My advice would be, take first-year as a trial run, give it your best shot and don’t write it off as the year that doesn’t count.
