9 Practical Things To Do When You Start University

You’re just about to start university, you’ve finished your packing and you’re all ready to go! When you first go to uni, Freshers’ week can seem to fly by in an excited blur and before you know it you’ll be back to reality, wishing you’d prepared a bit more for starting actual university.

This doesn’t have to be the case. Here are some practical things to do when you start uni that may not seem important right now, but you will appreciate later when you need them.

On your first day, you will undoubtedly be asked to join a line of students waiting to sort out their student ID. Whilst standing in this line, you will probably see several students standing to the side, desperately searching for something in their five big bags, with their parents standing next to them looking very irritated. These are more than likely the people who have forgotten an important form or a relevant piece of ID that they were asked to bring for their first day.

Don’t be like these people! Before you set off on the morning of your first day, make sure you’ve filled in all the forms you’ve been sent by the uni and have the ID you’ve been asked to provide. Your first day will be stressful enough as it is.

Your student ID will be your key for accessing university buildings, your identity on campus, and in some cases will be your gym pass and even your house key. Basically, it’s pretty important!

Going on a tour of the library is the type of thing you say you’ll probably get around to at some point and end up completely forgetting about.  This is mainly because there are just so many exciting things you could be doing when you’re starting university and, let’s be honest, a library tour is never top of that list.

Library tours basically give you a general induction to the facilities and services offered by the library when you’re starting university. We can appreciate that this sounds really dull, but in three months’ time when you desperately need to find a book and haven’t the foggiest idea how to navigate the library, how to check out a book or how to even use the uni printers, you’ll really wish you’d just attended a quick library tour. Besides you’re probably going to spend a lot of your time at uni in there, so might as well find out how it works right?

This is another one of those boring practical things that’s quite easy to forget. You’ll need to think about whether you want to register for a doctor in your university town or stick with your hometown. Most people do decide to register for a doctors in their university town, because there’s nothing worse than having really bad freshers’ flu and not having anywhere to go. Besides, you can usually visit your old doctors as a guest patient.

To change GP in the UK, all you need to do is visit the GP surgery you want to go to and ask them to register you as a patient. You will then be asked to fill in a registration form, and a request will be sent to your current GP for them to transfer your records over. Easy-peasy.