The most common sound you will hear the week after Freshers’ is the not so subtle sniffing of the person sitting next to you in a lecture. The inevitable Freshers’ flu commandeering the entire student body, as the post-Freshers’ reality sets in. Alas Freshers’ Week is over, and it’s time to marinate in the aftermath. You are in fact here to study a degree, not just plan prinks and haunt Fade Street until the sun comes up.
But does Freshers’ Week live up to its expectations? Is it truly the most hedonistic, euphoric and mythologised week of our college existence? Or is the reality far less magazine worthy?
The pressures that come with Freshers’ Week are not to be ignored. Not only is the environment new to all of us, but change itself can be fear-inducing. The expectation to find a different tiny top and skirt combo, spend an hour on a makeup routine and venture to a different club for an entire week can be suffocating. You are put in an inherently uncomfortable position to go out and force friendships, find a stranger to trust for the night, all in the name of the “Freshers’ experience”. It is often forgotten that there are serious risks taken in going out with people you met three hours ago: whether they are trustworthy is yet to be determined.
That guy you went home with, the girl you kissed in the stairwell, the friend you danced to Chappell Roan with, you may never see again. And don’t get me wrong, I see the appeal. The glorious anonymity of it all. The freedom to be whoever you want to be for the first time since leaving the safety of secondary school and loosening up with a bottle of Tesco’s cheapest white wine. To have the random memories of sharing a spice bag with a stranger who turns out to be in your course.
But are those fleeting moments worth the stress of the ordeal? It is becoming increasingly expensive to venture out for an evening in town, with club entry alone setting you back €10, and the price of a single vodka coke making you consider selling a kidney. Is it, therefore, a realistic endeavour to even undertake? If a night out is costing close to €40, that doesn’t seem remotely sustainable for an entire week. It leaves the poor Fresher unable to afford vegetables and forced to survive on meals that resemble prison food. The financial anxiety of the weeks to come put a dampener on the experience, as many come to learn that laundry isn’t free. Suddenly, you’re debating an hour’s walk home instead of an Uber to save a little more, the cold air cutting through with the truth behind a week of pints and parties.
Reflecting on my own experience of Freshers’ Week, and indeed the year that followed, most of the friends I have now, I didn’t meet until early November. The connections I made during Freshers’ Week are now merely people I greet with a cursory smile in a hallway. The nights out I had later in the year, where I had friends to fall back on, people to split a taxi home, a crush somewhere in the crowd to add to the entertainment, are infinitely more memorable than my first week in Dublin. The anxiety that plagued me during Freshers’ Week meant I was too nervous to allow myself to relax, instead coming across either entirely mute or annoyingly chauvinistic to try and pull my personality out from being tangled in the knots in my stomach. It’s advice I’ve heard again and again: the boy you meet and the friends you make in Freshers’ Week will not be making it to your graduation photos. And to remember this is to take a little of the pressure away from the week.
So, if the outcome is not finding your community, what is the point of Freshers’ Week? Is it a celebration of the start of college, a way to usher in a new era of young adulthood? It seems like a college rite of passage, but if you stay in for the night, I’m not too sure you are missing much. So much of college is yet to come. Speaking to my friends who have graduated, they rarely bring up Freshers’ Week as one of the greatest hits of their university days. Yes, it can offer nights that promote the recklessness and freedom that are supposed to define our late teens and early twenties. But I’d venture to say it falls short of expectations on the whole. Like I said, my favourite memories of my first year are society events, coffee dates and everything that came after the haze of the first month. Not the post-Freshers’ feeling that I missed out in that first week.
