Mitch's University Survival Guide

This guide is built to give you enough information to not be miserable during your first year of university.

Prepping for uni

So first off let's be honest you have no fucking clue what you're in for before you go to university. The good news is every fucking body is in the same fucking boat as you so chill the fuck out. The first thing you want to do after you've got your UCAS confirmation is of course make sure everything's gucci with the Student Loans Company and then immediately start looking at accommodation. Student accommodation is generally a seller's market so as soon as the A-Level results come out there's a massive rush for the cheapest rooms. The cheapest rooms sell out ON RESULTS DAY so really after you get the results and confirm you want to start looking at student accommodation. The best rooms are:

• Not the cheapest but relatively close,
• Are normally through a charity or uni-led organisation (such as SULETS, which is the Leicester based non-profit student housing organisation),
• Not through the cancerous mess that is the private estate agents,
• Has a tenancy agreement that doesn't require an arm, the blood of a newborn and a willingness to sell your soul for personal gain. If you don't know what a good tenancy agreement looks like, show it to your parents,
• Comes with a double bed for fucking and sleepovers.

Pretty much everything else is acceptable but get a place relatively quickly. Overall as long as it has enough room for a desk, bed and wardrobe you're pretty much fine. Getting a place that isn't on your university's 'recommended accommodation' list is normally cheapest. The vast majority of houses and flats around your university are let out to university students so ring places up and check them out.

Secondly your parents are probably going to overburden the fuck out of you when you pack your bags. All you need is one instrument (if you play), some kind of PC, maybe a chair, some boxes to put all your shit in, random pieces of shit that every human needs (I'm looking at you, Mr Multitool & Mr Toiletries Bag) and a small wardrobe's worth of clothes. If you plan on drinking (fucking do it you pussy) bring cards and possibly alcohol.

Lastly, seeing as you're probably a middle class prick and have been coddled by your parents for your whole life, learn the essential life skills that haven't been taught to you before heading to university. Learn how to cook by asking your parents how to cook, learn how to do every chore and learn how to regulate your time and emotions. This pays massive dividends later on in your life as essential life skills save you tonnes of time and effort over the course of 3 years and make you look fucking good in comparison to your peers.

Clubbing

The best part of university for yours truly. clubbing is generally the art of getting as close to blackout drunk round an acquaintances abode (or your own) with friends, making a drunken walk to either a pub, a bar or a club and dancing like no-body's watching. There's a couple of rules to clubbing, believe it or not:

1. If you're going to be upset if you lose it, don't bring it clubbing. This means buy yourself a cheap phone and wallet, leave your iPhone at home and don't wear anything that is expensive/has sentimental value to you. People get mugged and shit gets broken/ruined all the fucking time whilst clubbing: even at predrinks, people break glasses and bottles fucking constantly, before they're even hammered.
2. Buy yourself some medium-tier shoes that are a mix of classy, tough and easily cleanable. The most common shoes that people wear on a night out are Brogues in black or brown, with brown being the most common. Why buy dedicated dancing shoes, you may ask? They're going to get dirty as fuck and take a beating every week so you don't want to bring out some shoes that you care about. I personally prefer to wear boots on a night out but your choice.
3. Evening wear is generally classy casual. A nice enough shirt or jumper, jeans or chinos and some classy casual shoes (brogues, monks/double monks, oxfords are acceptable, no trainers and no suede) is generally the go-to. In RNB/Dance etc places you want to go more towards the classy and in Indie/Punk/Rock/Rave you can normally just put on a t-shirt and jeans/chinos. Stick to the fucking dress code because walking home on your own and changing is not fun. 
4. BUY EAR PLUGS. It's loud af in clubs and if you're off clubbing more than once a month you need ear plugs. Multiple of my hardcore raving friends have tinnitus at the tender age of 21 and it's not fun. I've actually got laid from ear plugs (because people start talking about you when they think you can't hear them). 
5. Learn how to dance (or close enough). Google it, buy a book or join a society. 
6. Eat well before heading out. Drinking on an empty stomach is how you end up getting more fucked than Bill Cosby's career after the rape allegations. A lot of my friends down a glass of milk before drinking as it lines the stomach and stops absorption of alcohol (supposedly) allowing you to drink your friends under the table.

Moving in

Moving in day is great, although pretty mad. There's not much to talk about here apart from pack your shit. Talk to, and arrange everything with your landlord before moving in and go find the nearest Tesco and get food (preferably with your parents money). Generally, keep it simple and bring stuff that you'll use a lot and not much else. Minimalism is relatively key and you can always buy other stuff later. I'd also suggest you bring a desk fan and food containers. After you've got your stuff unpacked, go talk to your flatmates, your neighbours and any friends you have in your city/university and organise some kind of social thing to get to know these people as chances are the ones that you actually like are going to become your friends or at least acquaintances for the next 3-4 years.

Food & Diet & Health

There's two things every person should be able to do: fight and cook. When it comes to learning how to cook, the three rules are to keep it simple, experiment and for the love of god use timers. Generally, you want to know how to cook 2-3 impressive dishes and then a good dozen or so 'Tuesday night' kind of dishes. Try to avoid dishes that aren't easily scale-able up and down, that require massive amounts of cooking time and can't be frozen. Generally, you want to make food in medium/large batches. This saves you from eating pasta every fucking night of the week and makes your time invested per meal very low. If you don't like eating full meals out of containers, make the individual parts of each meal and then freeze them. Because of this you want to bring or buy a lot of assorted sized containers. This'll free up your evenings, stop you from eating garbage in the mornings and calling it 'breakfast', and leaves you food to eat after a night out or when you get peckish in the middle of the night.

Guess what motherfucker, no-body can tell you that you need to eat your veggies or tell you off when you eat icecream and cookies for breakfast! Although I'd be a fucking hypocrite to tell you not to do that as I've literally only eaten Ben & Jerry's today, I recommend you don't do it too often. Generally, if you fuck up your diet for over a week everything else is going to start crumbling. Your diet should only consist of things that you actually enjoy eating, otherwise it'll just rot in the fridge (I speak from experience). Your diet should consist of mostly of vegetables and meat, and you should use carbs as a cheap way of filling you up and to put on weight and shouldn't really be eaten otherwise. The only times I eat a large amount of carbs is just before predrinks as it helps keep you sober. Unless you're throwing up, on drugs or dancing a massive amount you're going to put on weight from the alcohol, so generally running a caloric deficit is advised. I'd also suggest only eating when you're genuinely hungry rather than eating by the clock.

I could nag the fuck out of you over health but I'll keep it simple:

• Eat well. Vegetables, fish, garlic and ginger, lots of herbs and spices are your friends;
• Find a sport or hobby that you enjoy in regards to exercise;
• Sleep is your number one priority. It's important as fuck. Remove all interruptions (wear earplugs to bed and get yourself an eye mask). I don't set an alarm in the morning unless it's necessary. Ya;
• Eat garlic and ginger as they'll help you not become sick;
• Men, sleep with at least your lower half naked as your testes need to be cool in order to make testosterone and 90% of your testosterone is produced at night;
• If you're fat and don't want to be, don't bother doing running. Remove most of the carbs from your diet, still eat confectionery if you like confectionery, and swim regularly. Exercise doesn't burn a lot of calories regardless of what people tell you. Because you lose a massive amount of heat to the water, swimming will cause you to burn a lot of calories. Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day and is lean as fuck as he's in the water for 3-5 hours a day.
• If you need any more health advice, read the 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide by Timothy Ferriss or ask me!

Mental Health

I've deliberately put mental health as a separate topic as students, if you didn't know, generally have horrendous mental health. The main contributing factors in mental health, believe it or not, are:

• Achievement of goals
• Levels of discomfort/negative stimulus. A lot of students fall into the 'comfort trap': they have so much time, so much comfort and all their needs are met that they become exceptionally sluggish, bored and depressed. You need to be pushing yourself, discovering new things and hitting your goals otherwise you're going to develop depression/anxiety and probably be packed back off home for failing to get the grades. In short, do stuff that makes you feel alive.
• Levels of sunshine. Humans are meant to be jogging around savannas in western Africa, not sitting in an office in Glasgow. If you suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (like me!) try vitamin D tablets. 
• Sleep. If your sleep is getting interrupted you're going to fucking hate life. Wear earplugs to bed and if you have quite a bright room wear an eye mask.
• Diet. 
• Exercise. This is heavily linked to achievement of goals and negative stimulus. 

In effect, do things that you don't like doing but are productive and then go do stuff that you enjoy and your mental health will be pretty good. If stuff starts seriously going wrong, reach out to friends, family and professionals. Mental health issues are by far the most common reasons that students leave university without a degree, so overall keep on top of your shit.

Chores

Do your chores and then reward yourself for doing them. Your priorities should always be taking the bins out, washing the dishes and then doing laundry, in that order. Nobody likes their house smelling like rotting fish. Most people either have a cleaning rota or assign jobs to each flatmate. Most flatmates will put off chores a lot, so in order to avoid a passive-aggressive sticky-note war I suggest you walk up to them and ask them politely to do their chore.

Budgeting

Despite what a lot of people say, budgeting is relatively easy. Spend bare dollar on the things that matter to you and don't spend shit on the things that don't matter. ez pz. Oh, add 10% error to your budget (so if your budget is £100 a week, expect to spend £110) because you'll probably routinely overspend.

Being an Adult

University life is a lot easier when you start acting like an adult. The key to being an adult is to be proactive when you have the time and energy so it doesn't matter if you slack during the times that you're ill or feel like shit. Nip problems in the bud, do some work before the deadlines, talk to your flatmates and solve domestic issues before they become a problem. Overall, when I'm proactive with my uni work I get about 10% higher grades on my coursework. 10% is the difference between grades.

The second one is to listen to your mind and body, work out what's causing you to feel that way and solve it. A lot of the time you'll be having lack of motivation, productivity issues, or sometimes you'll just wake up in the morning and feel like shit. Find out what's causing it and act on that knowledge.

Thirdly I'm going to talk about is taking and understanding negative criticism. Criticising you is literally the best thing somebody can do to you, and everyone loves criticising! Getting negative feedback on work is genuinely the best thing for you as you can learn much more from that than someone telling you that you're God and you shit rainbows on a weekly basis. You should be growing and improving yourself and your situation every day. You're 100% responsible for your life and everything in your life can be changed with relative ease. If you're feeling bad about something, don't wallow on it, go out and sort it out (and if you can't work out how to sort it out, ask for advice/try things).

Generally, problems in your life are compound problems (which is why you haven't sorted them out yet). The best way to solve problems is to work out what those problems rely on or are caused by and to attack those problems rather than attacking the problem directly. For example, let's say you want to pull on a night out because you're lonely. You could go out more often and hit on more girls, but if you're ugly and drunk you're not going to get any. Instead, you should take up new hobbies, expand your social circle, start weightlifting/training, upgrade your wardrobe, eat better and stop getting as hammered at predrinks. Then, you should work on pulling by looking at how others do it, watching videos of pick up artists, etc.. This is the Confucian philosophy of 'action through inaction' or solving problems through personal growth and it's surprisingly effective.

The last thing I'd like to talk about is understanding and regulating your emotions. If you're suddenly angry or having emotional problems, chances are it's the rest of your brain subtly telling you that something's bothering it and you should probably think it out. Personally I was having PTSD-like symptoms when I was doing household chores, getting to university and doing university work. I had to take some time out and think retrospectively about what was causing me to want to break something every time I looked at a dishwasher sponge. I realised that it was because I'd always get shouted at over the dishes and a plethora of other chores by my mum, and so I'd always do the chores whilst I was either angry or annoyed. I always also used to be shouted at by both my teachers and mum over homework and so I'd developed a habit of hating coursework over that too. And again, I'd been pretty much shouted at for the whole of my A-levels by my mother and teachers over my attendance so I fucking hated just turning up. Obviously when I realised all of this shit, I had to systematically deprogram myself from linking those emotions to whatever I was doing. Bad emotions are your body's call to arms.

Education

The holy trinity of getting good grades is:

1. Set hours of work during the day (most people say between 2pm and 5pm I'm gonna do work) and do work during those. That being said, also set time for relaxing/social stuff too.
2. Do work everyday and not cram it into the last week or so (on average you'll get 12% more marks as someone that methodically does their work compared with a crammer) before the deadline
3. Turn up to most lectures.

Bob's your uncle babyyyyyyyy

Dealing with shit

Shit goes wrong in a uni student's life. I got hit by a car, made homeless, mugged, broke my hand (not by getting hit by a car), suffered from so many horrendous illnesses, threw up fucking loads and almost got stabbed a couple of times when I was a uni student. Do not ignore the massive problems that will occur, deal with them first. When shit goes wrong, talk to your parents for advice first, then your professor/support lady at the uni and then ask me. Then get a plan together and deal with it. Notify your university, they'll help out so much it's unreal. The reason people drop out of uni is because they have a problem and they don't talk to anyone about it and it fucks them up.

Setting up for second year

Really, about November/December time you need to start thinking about who you want to live with next year. You need to sign a contract as soon as possible ish. Generally speaking you want more than enough money in a savings account at the end of the year (about 1k+) in order to put down a deposit on a place and pay the first few months rent. Generally speaking it isn't hard to sort out your second year stuff but the earlier you start, the easier it's gonna be. So do it ya bellend

Tips and tricks

• Work out who you want to have in your house in second year early on. Some motherfuckers are just messy, some are unorganised. Avoid them like the plague.
• Enjoy your time, don't sit around bored
• Eat well, sleep well and exercise well.
• Ear plugs are love, ear plugs are life
• Set up group chats on Whatsapp
• Talk to fucking everybody seeing as you'll have a lot of opportunities pop up when you're at uni from just chatting away to people. Whether it's your flatmates, someone that you've ended up sharing an elevator with, your parents, the lady at the checkout, people on a night out etc.. The more people you chat with the more opportunities you'll get just thrown at you, it's great!
• Cook something relatively nice for your flatmates early on in the year and you'll get a bunch of free shit/help from them throughout the year.
• Plan interesting stuff to do weeks ahead
• Get a job whilst at uni, it helps in so many ways!
• Plan internships/other stuff to put on your CV throughout the year and especially during the summer
• Cook early and often, and cook in large batches and freeze that shit
• Be cheeky af with the opposite sex and constantly chat to people 
• If you're suffering mentally or physically before exams, notify your uni/professors and they'll be happy to defer your exams to a later date so you don't get a 2:2 like me lul
• kys

References

• Personal experience, because everyone knows that personal experience is the best academic reference around
• Leaving home survival guide by some random ho, good book on like the basics of being an adult
• 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide by Timothy Ferriss
• Marx's Capital because it's the best book ever
• Bunch of PUA stuff, mostly RSDTyler, good shit if ya ever want to learn how to get laid
• Oh like a 1st year book on contract law that I had lying about
• https://www.reddit.com/r/EatCheapAndHealthy/comments/61sp0r/how_to_survive_on_10_for_a_week/dfh1sld/
• Check out /r/studentfood , /r/mealprepsunday, shit like that. Reddit is great.
• Erm yeah I think that's it

Cheers for reading! I'll be updating this as I think of things I've missed so check it out later! If you want me to make you a cookbook hmuuuuuuuuu