Student life

University is hard. You are essentially thrown into the deep end of life and expected to swim. From my personal experience, high school won’t prepare you for life at university, but maybe this blog will help. Today, I present to you four things you need to do in order to survive at university.

I am extremely fortunate to be studying not only in the Netherlands, but at Leiden University. Why would I call this fortunate, you may ask? I previously studied at St Andrews in Scotland and I would also say that I was lucky to have done that as well. But things have changed in the UK as we all know. My bachelors programme was around £1,800 a year. At that price, the level of education was fantastic, and I am still very glad I got the opportunity to study there.

Even though I have a huge imagination, what I am going to write is really something unexpected. 

Four things are recurring in this story: nutella, parmesan, my granddad’s backpack and a moka. 

When I picked my A-Levels my subjects ranged from what might get me into an accounting career, a languages career, a politics, or law career. I have always liked the idea of a diverse career path, or so I believed. I kept my options open because I didn’t know what I wanted, not because I had enjoyed the variety in the first place.  When I applied for a law degree I based my decision on nothing other than the highest grades I had achieved. My achievement had shown me what I would be best at. Which is great, isn’t it?

How often do you consider the possibility that you could be wrong about your most cherished beliefs? How much time have you spent thinking through arguments you deeply disagree with? How often do you seek to engage intellectually with those who hold opposing views?

I raise these questions because I value intellectual exchange and would like to see it flourish, not flounder, in the face of heated disagreement.

When you start university and are warned about mental health issues, you assume that the warnings and reminders of support are for other people. The ones who already have mental health issues, and the types of people we might assume are already at risk. It’s not true. Mental health at university exists in a whole different realm to mental health anywhere else and it’s time that that is acknowledged. It doesn’t play by the rules everyone seems to have constructed.

Considering applying for a job as a student assistant at my university, I was desperately seeking for an article or any kind of information about the duties, tasks and challenges in that position.

Despite an only vague idea and limited understanding of what could await me, I applied and got the job. Now, with an eight month working experience I would like to unveil the more or less hidden secret of student assistants and to provide an insight into the everyday life of a “professor’s brownie”.

It’s that time of year when university departments all over the country open up their doors in a bid to recruit students and graduates onto one of their Masters courses. But, with so many institutions, and even more courses, there’s a vast amount of choice out there, which can often make thinking about postgraduate study a very overwhelming and difficult experience.  

When you apply to medical school there is the unspoken idea that the London medical schools are best. With three of them consistently in the top ten for medicine in university league tables it’s unsurprising ‒ they boast high levels of research, wide catchment areas for placements and some of the brightest and best lecturers and clinicians to learn from.

When I imagined what life would be like on my year abroad, I pictured myself drinking beer with my new best friends (Günther and Julia) whilst watching Goodbye Lenin. When the film ended, we would devour a black forest gateaux and go on a hike (probably in the black forest) so as to utilise the sensible footwear and rucksacks that Günther and Julia would have inevitably brought with.