oh man...this is my first night of university

and let me tell you. there are some HI LA RIOUS playlists.

should i call my shared folder the same thing as my room number?

in a way this is kind of awesome.

ONLY ONE IS ASIAN

everyone is trying WAY too hard. and its like some kind of sex festival also.

now drunken riff raff have come in and are discussing rats. and that the males stink but the females dont smell very bad.

what if they think im a hoodrat

"YOU LOOK LIKE YOU LIKE ROCK"

"WE LIKE EVERYTHING FROM LED ZEPPELIN TO DIMMU BORGIR JOIN US"

first question

"u out on the pull tonight then mate"

Perhaps it is because they are almost all teenagers. Most teenagers are annoying and boring. Find some older friends.

Ne'er truer words spoke.

Mom (a graduate of an admittedly small and quite sharp institution, the University of the Pacific) to me before going to UCLA after a school career where I was frankly mostly bored with my surroundings and the classes: "You'll like it in college, everyone there actually wants to be there and it's just at a higher level all around."

Me to mom some weeks into my first quarter: "You know what you said about how everyone in college is cooler and more interesting and all that? You were wrong."

mum's a liar.

Meeting people just because you live in the same place is the worst way to make friends. I didn't like any of the people I lived near in my halls.

Maybe that's why I'm living at home this year.

and complain about their internet regulations regarding downloaads. :(

The IT guy where I lived was very relaxed about sharing within the network. Unfortunately everyone had really shite music tastes, so that didn't help. Getting crappy films was easy though.

the best thing about college is having so much time to do non college related things (if your course allows that). in the 4 years of college I can honestly say I've had the best time of my life but nothing to do with the place itself or actually being in college, I suppose it's just fun actually discovering some of the above things and what Ally mentioned which despite seeming simple is a kind of journey in itself I think.

so it goes at big state american U.

question is...do i take my PS2 memory card.

The first weeks are definitely a bit offputting but remember that for a lot of people this is their first taste of freedom so between the giddiness and the need to impress there is still a desire to just chat and feel comfortable. Be friendly and people can't help but reciprocate. I made my best friends by total accident and years later (well I graduated 3 years ago) I can still rely on them.

Have fun anyway cos for the next couple of weeks you can get up to all manner of things with nothing so trivial as course work getting in the way!

And less of the computer lab. People on the interweb can't give you shots and launch you at some fine young thing in the Student Union Bar!

is this some kind of euphemism i don't know about?

god, uni is so different for you young scamps - the interweb basically didn't exist until my final year, so i actually had to, y'know, go out and meet actual people an' stuff. just go to everything you're invited to for a bit, you'll very quickly discover your tolerance level (this usually correlates with the level of free bouze on offer).

fyi I met my three best uni mates at a Law Society cheese and wine/karaoke soiree - none of us was studying law, none of us did the karaoke (although i was meant to - details anon), and the cheese ran out extremely quickly. my new friends found me comatose, curled around the toilet bowl, with crimson vomit down my combat trousers, having gone to look for me when my name came up for "tainted love" and i was nowhere to be seen. we've all been friends ever since. so happy endings can happen!

erm so yes my first night of uni.. yes.. i drank a load of quad vodkas and run out of money and then offered my undying love to a girl in exchange for more vodka. i don't remember any of these until the next day when the girl told me about all this (she didn't take up the offer.)

and then two days later i was at this "beach party" and i drank loads of vodka again, and went on this "surfing machine" where you basically stand on this surfboard thing which wobbles and jerks about and you have to stay on it. I was very drunk and fell off very quickly, and then discovered that they hadn't yet switched on the machine!

so, ken c's top tip of surviving freshers week: be more of a drunken dick than everyone else and thus you won't be all upset feeling that you're smarter than everyone else. out student the students. you might even get elected into the JCR.

I know it's a different epoch but I couldn't help but think "bloody overprivileged students, in my day we had to traipse 200 yards in t'snow to use the P90s in t'library and thought nothing of waiting 15 minutes for t'hotmail to download".

This will be the most potentially interesting and opportunity-filled year of your life, Hari. Do everything you can to make the most of it.

but i don't know whether even that'd match the legend of the mythical "girl with no gag reflex" who completed the "Campus 14"... Erm, "Campus 14" is the uni bar crawl of all 14 bars on campus, drinking a pint in every bar, apparently nobody has ever managed it except this one girl who once had some kind of food poisoning and some consequence lost her gag reflex and managed to drink her way to mythical status.

Although dying in my own vomit on the first day of uni would have been pretty special too. There were several other myths and legends around but i can't even remember them now.

All I remember from uni now is TANK GIRL who used to go to rock city.

This is too painfully true. Except that I went to a school for clever-clogs girls, and had over-achieving clever-clogs friends. And then I went to a not hugely selective university and discovered that most people there have absolutely 0 interest in anything academic at all, and are much stupider than the people I knew at school.

I didn't drink at all in Fresher's week that I remember. I met one boy from my halls who I really liked, and still do, and hung around with him. We half-heartedly stalked Alan McGee outside the union. Most of the time I was locked in my room on the internet, though.

This has just reminded me, most of the people in my halls were vet students. On one of the occasions I attempted to socialise in fresher's week, I asked one of them how come his arm was in plaster. He said that he had had it up a cow's arse (doing some vet thing, I assume) and the cow's legs gave way and broke his arm.

... and fervently hope, I imagine. Wow.

I got drunk and sent emails (emails! I'd never seen such a thing in my life!) to friends back home on my first night at university. No interweb in my room though, or indeed any technology at all.

I made some friends on my corridor but mainly I got to know people through pretentious loser soc the arts magazine and sad man-hater soc women's group.

Getting very drunk is an excellent way to meet people and in no way will you end up doing lots of things you regret.

i would, on the other hand, be a very quick typist.

I wished I could end up being a silly drunk. I spent the first few weeks of term proving that I could outdrink beer with the blokes in my group of friends (most of them didn't have much of a life going out wise until they got to uni.. i know) and taking them home after they started falling over.

I got kinda down about it after I'd not really made any proper friends for a few weeks, but then I realised that in fact pretty much everyone I had met up to that point was a cunt.

Needless to say, it was shortly after that revelation that I stopped trying and people who I got on with actually arrived on the scene.

well, yes. but that's what university is. except for boarding school types -- not noticeably better behaved!

Lesson: avoid poster sales.

Anyway, the result is, I have made no (0) friends here so far and I'm getting a bit pessimistic about things now. What do I do?

HAHAHAHA.

i met a bloke sitting next to me at orientation. we went to the pub afterwards, and he turned out to be an utter... bastard, really. just in lots of ways.

the next day, i met a guy called paul, who became my best friend at college. we stuck together, got drunk together, had fun. second year, he went away to america, but was friendly enough with my fellow students, and made a great, great friend, alex, soon into that year, with whom i spent many late hours blearily arguing the universe.

all in all, i had a great time. lots of acquaintances i really appreciated, a few really great friends (still friends ten (fuck TEN????) years later. had a substantial life away from college, but it was a London Uni and that's often the way, and i don't really regret it.

I think the best attitude to go to Uni with is "I don't have to do this if I don't want to". Cos you don't. You just can, which is great.