A University Experience: Chapter 6 - People

Introduction

Hello and welcome back!

In this post, I want to talk about what it was like getting to know a new group of people. To me, wording it like that sounds kind of silly. I know it's important that you don't isolate yourself and I've got a bad habit of just doing my own thing and living a relatively quiet lifestyle. I can go quite some time without talking to people before

I think the only people I really spoke to back home were colleagues. Outside of work, I didn't really have a social life besides the people I spoke to online.

For me, meeting others or introducing myself to strangers was a big deal. I'm an introvert by nature. I'm the kind of person that would rather buy a box of beers and play games than go out clubbing. With moving to somewhere I've never been before, that had to change.

Planning

Initially, when I moved to Liverpool, I knew one person. That was the lecturer who interviewed me. I'd met them in person once and been emailing them since to find out where I should be looking for accommodation and seeing if there were any extra-curriculars that I could take up when the course started.

I built this idea in my head that with the flat I owned, I could use it as a bit of a social hub. Having friends over for gaming, music, movies, takeaways, studying and letting them crash on the sofa if they're too pissed to get back home.

Even when I found out that I'd be staying in student halls thanks to a bad landlord experience. I was still hopeful that I'd have someplace that people would want to come to. In reality, I was quite happy to have a living space that I could escape to at the end of the day. Not to say that Liverpool was bad or anything, I simply found how much I value the time I have to myself.

Classmates

So it's the first day of uni. I was up, dressed and caffeinated at something stupid like 5am, thanks to my former career where I put out newspapers in the morning.

I remember that I had a Game of Thrones t-shirt on, hoping it might start a conversation if I couldn't. That did actually work and I started chatting to a couple of students in the class about favourite scenes. We all agreed that season 8 just shouldn't have happened. It's a spinoff that span out of control as far as I'm concerned.

I walked into that room and most people already knew eachother. They had come onto the course after just completing a Level 3 Diploma (I'd earned mine back in 2017). I was the oldest person in that room by about 3 or 4 years, I only felt that old once in the space of two years. It was my own fault, I made a reference to a TV show that was a bit older than I am. One lunch break, we had a guessing game with each others ages. Someone guessed that I was 18 years old, so I was pleasantly surprised that I looked 4 years younger than I actually was. I waited until I got back to class before I told him, I wanted to savour the moment.

As every class does, we had slackers (putting it politely). There was one in particular that irritated me to no end. The thing that really wound me up was how, when I was staying late most days to improve my work, he'd leave on time or early as he'd submitted the bare minimum. Frankly, that shouldn't have gotten to me. The reason it did bother me was that I knew he'd be going back home to play games with no responsibilities.

Where as, I'd stay later and make my work look as good as it possibly can. After which, I'd have to make my way back to student halls, make a meal, clean up after and then I'd often carry on studying.

I remember airing my thoughts to my parents about this. Saying that it was unfair that I'm putting in this extra work and he's the one that gets to leave early. The answer I got was that by putting in this effort now, I will go further. My portfolio will appear more polished and the time I spend on a project will show how much I care about the work I am creating.

A became good friends with a couple of guys on the course. We often met up in town for food or a movie we all wanted to see. I think we even went on a hike at one point. They're probably the people I helped the most, or rather we helped eachother out with technical issues and project planning. It could be to nudge someone so they could turn off YouTube before the lecturer came over our side of the room or help decipher what went wrong with their 3D models.

The Wonderer

Back when I was working in Liverpool, I met a computer systems student who was studying machine learning. He was about the same age as my brother and we had similar interests. This guy was an international student from China, when I tell you that his spoken English made me feel bad for not having a secondary language, I made it my mission to learn at least a few words. There were very few times that I had to rephrase a sentence in English for him to understand.

I had a chat with him on the way back from work one night and I started to tell him how I found it difficult to network with people up in Liverpool, how I could count on one hand the number of people I talk to on a weekly basis. With that, I realised he had it worse. Here I am telling him that I find it hard to talk to people and he had to learn the language so that he could talk to people. I apologised and told him that I felt like a dick for saying it. He got it though, he completely understood what it was like.

He told me that he feels he has to talk to everyone, because he knows nobody in this country. My friend was not kidding. He wouldn't just talk to students in his class or colleagues at work, he would talk to quite literally anyone he comes across. This one time, I went shopping in Tesco and caught him inviting a girl on the checkouts to a karaoke night he was hosting that evening. He didn't know her before that conversation and she looked more than a little confused at the situation. Also, we'd have to send someone to the bar with him to get a round of drinks. Chances are that we wouldn't see that next pint for a good half hour.

He came to me at one point and said there was an issue with the bins at his accommodation. I did my big bro thing and helped him look into it. Turned out they had a new landlord, this company made it the student's responsibility to take the bins out, where before it had been a staffed building. There were new threats of fining students hundreds if not thousands of pounds if the place was a mess when they leave.

We went door to door in the flats to find out if anyone knew about it. They were all in the same predicament and only a few knew about it. None of the students had a key to take the bins out of the side door and onto the street. As a result, rubbish bags were piling high in that place.

We wrote emails and made a couple of phone calls. By that weekend, he was free of charges as long as his studio flat was immaculate. As far as I know, he didn't pay anything.

Going out

I've been asked a few times why I don't go clubbing much back home. I put it down to a bit of social anxiety or preferring being at home. After two years in Liverpool, I'm not sure it's either. I found that going out drinking in bars and clubs in Liverpool was easier and more enjoyable than back home. Like I mentioned in a past blog, I would often walk past clubs just to see if I like the kind of music playing in there. I think part of it might be anxiety, but it's more a case of not wanting to have a run-in with certain people. By going to Liverpool, I knew that I didn't know anybody there. I could relax, drink and be myself without a care for anything but being able to make a 10 minute walk back to the flat at the end of the night.

Going someplace new and starting fresh had a real... I don't know, like a liberating feeling. It was like I was free from the person everyone knows me to be. Sure, you've still got to go up to people and say hello. After that, nobody knows that you've spent the past however-long working in a dead end job. For me, it was that nobody knew that I'd been studying game design for 3 years. All of a sudden, I'd be talking to people about music tastes and finding out that someone saw a band in Manchester the night before I saw them in London.

Thanks for reading this far, it means a lot to me!

Feel free to look at some of my 3D work or read another post.

Hopefully, I'll see you all next week.