Uni life – some practical tips and tricks

I have now been living the student life in Bristol for more than two months, so I have accumulated a fair amount of experience about the practicalities of studying at university and passing the days in a new country. I though I might share a few useful notes and tips for those who might be thinking about embarking on a similar adventure!

Studies

Perhaps the central aspect of student life is managing your studies. Normally, you would not go to university unless you want a degree. Some people take the studies more seriously than others, though, so how much time and effort you spend with them depends entirely on you – how much you like the subject; how badly you need to achieve good grades; how much time you need to understand and absorb the material.

Therefore, there is not much I can say about this, except that it is important to find a balance between studies and life: pay attention in the lectures, process the material and finish your assignments on time, but do not lose yourself in the workload.

The degree of self-studies relative to the time you spend in school (“contact hours”) varies between programmes. In Paleontology and Evolution, we have 18 contact hours per week, but are expected to spend at least the double amount of time on self-studies. This means that our mandatory timetable is mild – our average day consists of two one-hour lectures and a three-hour practical, usually with a multi-hour lunch break. I know of others, engineers for example, who have days full of lectures from 9 am to 5 pm with only an hour of lunch break. With such a timetable, it is difficult not to take the studies seriously – the work is harder to ignore/postpone. 

Food

I live in a catered university hall – Badock Hall – where the students are provided breakfast and dinner on weekdays and breakfast and lunch on weekends. There are other types of student accommodation for first-year students in Bristols (see The first days in Bristol), but a catered hall might be a more relaxed option for students new to the city/country, since one does not need to worry about food except for one meal a day. The accommodation fees for catered halls are higher, so whether it pays off depends on your own food requirements (quantity and quality).

I, then, only have to fix lunch for five days and dinner for two. The problem is that there is no fully equipped kitchen in hall for that purpose. In our floor, we have a microwave, a kettle, a toaster (I think…) and a fridge. Now, think carefully for a second: most of the lunches will be eaten during the lunch breaks in town, not at hall. Thus, to prepare transportable food is ideal. The most apparent solution is sandwiches. Bread is cheap and filling, and, depending on your spread preferences, it can make a tasty and healthy meal that is not difficult to prepare and bring to school – a sandwich will not go bad for lying in a bag your backpack for a couple of hours; I even make them the night before and keep them in the backpack so I have them for the next day (I do this for several reasons, the to main ones being that I do not have time to prepare the sandwiches in the morning because breakfast begins rather late in relation to how long time I need to eat and walk to school, and that my roommate has sleepin every day, so I try to minimise the amount of disturbance in the mornings by fixing everything I can the night before; more about that below).

For the dinners in the weekend, I usually have slightly more elaborate food: instant noodle soup and/or powder soup, usually accompanied by a sandwich or two. The instant noodle soups are incredibly cheap (11 pence each at Sainsbury’s! even if I eat two in one sitting, it is extremely economical), albeit not the most nutritional foods. Still, soup is not bad food in a fairly cold country infamous for copious amounts of rain – a cup of warm, creamy powder soup is just so good in dark, rainy days. Both these soup types only require boiling water to be added, so I am perfectly fine with a lunchbox that can handle hot water (for the noodle soup) and a cup (for the powder soup).

Not long ago, I also realised that couscous (grains of durum wheat, I think, treated in some special way… I’m not really sure of exactly what it consists of, but it is a good substitute for pasta or rice) does not require a stove – unlike pasta, rice, polenta and potatoes, etc. – so I can make delicious salads for days when I really feel like varying my diet. To make couscous, simply add some oil and salt to the grains, pour boiling water over them (roughly one part couscous two parts water), cover with a lid and leave for a few minutes; stir around with a fork to loosen the grains and see if all water has evaporated or been absorbed by the grains (they expand quite a lot, so be careful! I made the mistake of making so much couscous I could hardly put anything else in my lunchbox). To make a good, fresh salad, I recommend adding onion, pepper and tomatoes (all raw), plus chicken, meatballs and/or tuna (meats that are great eating cold).

This might sound a bit like the equivalent of living on scraps, but it is an economical and reasonably healthy solution to the problem of balancing food and money. Richer students may afford to eat out often, or buy pre-made food every day. However, I figure most need a cheaper alternative. This does not mean that one cannot treat oneself to a dinner out once in a while!

Exercise

I could not find any suitable karate clubs in Bristol. By “suitable”, I mean in terms of location relative to where I live, training times and price. So, I figured I need to do some other form of exercise, but…

The university’s sports and exercise facilities have a weird (weird bad) system, where you can only pay for a one-year or three-year membership. Also, the payment must be made over the internet. Since my Swedish bank card does not work with most internet payment thingies here (something that has caused me immense trouble with paying accommodation fees, for example), and the process of obtaining a bank card took about a month (I’m not joking! – apply for a new bank account and card as soon as you set foot on English soil if you intent to live here), and since I made the mistake of assuming it would take less than a week and therefore waited for about three weeks before I sat down and looked through the available banks and made my choice (here comes the point about exercise, which is the topic of this section), it was already too late to purchase a one-year membership (they refused to allow me a trial session to test the gym, and I am not willing to pay for three years if I don’t know the facilities are good) without needing to go at least three or four times a week for it to be worth the money, and I simply don’t have that time, especially as the cheap membership is only for off-peak hours, i.e. times when people usually don’t go, so early weekdays and late weekends. So, you see, it is just too complicated…

Instead, I go student style: the free option. I go to the drying room – where people in our building are supposed to hang their clothes to dry – and work out with my own exercises there. I cannot do it in my room since it is shared (more about that later), so the drying room is a great alternative – no one ever comes there, so no one will bother!

I have also been thinking of picking up climbing (indoors). There is a climbing centre somewhere in Bristol, but I am a bit too lazy to find it… Some day, I hope I will move my butt there, because I know climbing is great fun and great training once you get started!

Living in a shared room

Sharing a room is cheaper, but can be detrimental if your roommate is mental (I know a friend whose roommate was!). Luckily, Patrick is really great! Albeit something of a heavy partyer, he respects that I am not and doesn’t have parties in our room, even though it is colossal and thus ideal for a minor pre-party drinking session. He does go out clubbing until late in the night, but rarely wakes me up when he comes back. In return, I try my best not to wake him when I have to wake up at 7.30 every morning while he has sleep-in every day (he studies music; his time table is even more relaxed than mine). In the weekends, when Patrick sleeps in until lunch, but I want to get up for breakfast (which is slightly more luxurious in the weekends, and which I already have paid for anyway) and get some work done, I get up quietly, and, when I come back, I take my things and go to the drying room where I can sit and study or whatever I intend to do. It is warm and nice, although hard to sit on the floor for hours. (I use a towel as cushion.) We both make our sacrifices for the other’s well-being.

This, I would say, is the single most important thing for people sharing room in student accommodation: mutual understanding and respect. Patrick and I are not best friends, but we do get along very well! Imagine living with someone you cannot talk to, or that you don’t trust, or that makes a complete mess in the whole room (Patrick is the messier of us, but he has managed to confine the ‘mess’ to his side).

Finances

Um… I was intending to write something about managing your finances as a student for last, but I realised I do not have much to say as yet. I have not made any thorough budget calculations yet. What I have done so far is to record the most of my weekly spending in different categories to have a feel of how much I spend and on what. When the term is over, I will sit down and think about whether I need to cut back the rest of my time here or if I will manage as I am going now.

I would also like to talk about scholarships and other ways of student funding, but searching for them is immensely tedious, and I have not even been successful in finding and applying for a single one yet. Once I have my studies under full control, however, I will make a serious effort to explore as many possibilities as I can find. Maybe I will write some tips for you then!