Sharing flats with new people
This whole university experience has been so new and so interesting for me, and pretty much completely unlike anything I could do back home.
When going to uni, most of the new students live in uni accommodation. This means that they get placed in a flat with people they most likely have never met before; people from all over the UK and even the world!
No matter how many of you there are in the new place or where you’re all from, everyone has to learn to live with each other. So here’s my experience sharing a flat, and now a house, with 7 other people.
I used to live in the Glasney Student village, which separates people into flats of 7 rooms in which can live up to 8/9 people. In order to cut my living costs, I used to share a room which meant that I not only had to learn to live with 7 new people but also had to share a room with one of them. The best advice that I can give you to get along with everyone is to be friendly and open about who you are. Remember, you are living with these people, they will find out who you are anyway! To make breaking the ice easier, it might be useful to go and help everyone move in, granted you have moved in yourself, but you could maybe make plans to attend the freshers' events together. The thing that made everyone super close in my flat was watching TV and finding the weirdest shows that we could.
The experience of living in uni accommodation is going to be different for everyone. For some, it will be the best thing ever and you’ll never want to leave these people, and for others, it is going to require a bit more work. Not everyone is going to get along with the people they live with. The best you can do in that situation is to try and be nice. Try finding out why you don’t like the experience and see if you can fix it. If not, you can always go to the university and talk to somebody and possibly move house, but in order to do that, the situation does have to be very dire. Even then, do not feel like you are not in an important enough situation and talk to somebody and see what can be done to make everyone feel happy.
Everyone’s learning something new, and positive changes can always be made if you communicate with each other.
Going back to the point on learning to live with others, what some people don’t always understand is that you can’t live the same way that you used to at home. You can’t just go around leaving the biggest mess, because other people also have to live in that space. Some compromises need to be made.
Sometimes, others leave some clutter behind them and you might get annoyed with that, but for that reason, you need to talk to people and remember, that this is new for all of you. It means that sometimes, if not most of the time, you’ll have to learn to adapt your behaviour to what others are doing. Everyone’s learning something new, and positive changes can always be made if you communicate with each other.
Even though some compromises have to be made, if you decide to live with other people, it is also one of the best things ever! There’s always someone to talk to, to watch something with, to do something with.
Although it can be frustrating at times, and the people I live with still manage to annoy me a lot, I would not change it for anything. They have opened me up to so many new experiences and I am so thankful that this university put me in the same flat as them!
I hope some of this was helpful and maybe relieved some of your worries about sharing a flat with random people as it can be very stressful if you don’t know what to expect, but remember, that any experience is as good as what you take away from it!
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