Sydney Life

If you’re reading this, you need to get a life.

JUST KIDDING.

Making friends at uni is harder than at high school, because there are so many people bustling around doing their own little thing. Then again, the fact that there is a bar on campus can, on occasion, lubricate the situation.

Your first lecture might be a bit scary if you don’t know anyone in it. My advice is to go for it - sit next to someone and just say say hi! I know this sounds contrived and something that people say to do and never really do, but I actually did this in one of my first biology lecture... and I wish I could say now that the girl I sat with is my bestest friend in the world but the truth is I didn’t see her around much after that and actually I can’t even remember her name. However, I had someone to have lunch with that day, and it definitely eased my nerves a bit about approaching and meeting people randomly. AND, I remember her face.

Also, your tutorials will begin in the second week, and they are generally a LOT smaller in class numbers than lectures. You can at least ask the person next to you what こんにちは私は麻子です means, or maybe ask if you can borrow their white-out.

If you’re doing a science subject chances are you’ll have a lab (starting in week two) and you’ll probably be in a lab group or something which will make it easier to meet people. Then you just have to get out there and ask them when they have breaks and if they want to spend them with you! After my first biology lab I asked one of my new friends out for a coffee on the way to Redfern station, AS FRIENDS, mind, and though he accepted, he innocuously mentioned his girlfriend in the next sentence... (don’t you hate it when people do that?) But still, we managed to be good friends until he left after semester 1.

Another way to make friends is to use people you already know. This is a bit of a silly technique used by a lazy friend of mine - he was so lazy he couldn’t even be bothered making friends for himself. He actually told me halfway through the year, that if he just hung out with me, he could make friends with the people I had made friends with, without having to trawl through all the people that I made acquaintances with and rejected (ie people he wouldn’t like). This is not a totally recommended strategy because we sort of stopped being friends halfway through last semester (long story involving a stats quiz, him trying to teach me overly complicated things that I didn’t even need for the quiz over msn at 11pm the night before, me rejecting that particular help, then him claiming he’d never talk to me again if I didn’t listen. I took the chance and went offline... go figure). Consequently, he lost most of his friends base. What a sad ending for him.

The final thing to do is, follow your friends up... organise coffee breaks, last minute study sessions, or go to uni events together (scisoc trivia night sealed the best-friend deal for me and a friend I’d just met at the beginning of first year!) And don’t forget to have fun!