Friends

Help for the Hopelessly Homesick

HUGE POST ALERT! This is a long list of 21 tips for beating homesickness. You may want to bookmark or save it if you don’t have time to read it all at once.

Lonely Chair (photo by daycha)

Settling in to a new place isn’t always easy. Even second year students can have difficulties adapting to a house off campus, living with a group of people who may like to do things a bit differently.

At these points, whether you’re a Fresher or an established student in new surroundings, it’s not uncommon to feel a bit homesick. And it makes matters even harder if you know you have loved ones missing you too. So what’s to be done to take away the homesickness blues?

1. Memories – bring posters and ornaments that remind you of home. Put up some photos of your loved ones, friends and family.

2. Resist the urge to call/e-mail/write every five minutes – Dwelling on it just makes things worse, because you’re not immersing yourself in anything else. The less you do and the more you dwell will make matters worse. Enjoy your new surroundings as much as you can.

3. Talk to others – You’ll find you’re definitely not alone. It’s not unusual to feel this way. And even if you believe everyone else around you is taking it a lot better than you, they are probably putting on a brave face and getting on with life as best they can. Guess what the next tip’s going to be…?

4. Get on with life the best you can – Accept that life moves on. It’s not surprising that you feel this way. For the majority of uni students, this is the first real time of living away from home. If it didn’t happen now, it would happen at some point anyway. The road to independence is a good one and it’s what so many teenagers want. Once the reality sets in, however, some people backtrack on the wish for that independence. Go ahead, you’re allowed to enjoy life. Despite what the media push to you, life is less likely to bite you on the bum than you’d imagine.

5. Keep going and set goals – In relation to the above tip, remind yourself not to give up. The best way to do this is to form a plan and note down any goals you want to achieve in the next days, weeks, months, years…

Work out what things you want in the short, medium and long term. If you’re finding it difficult to think of anything you want out of university life, you may wish to speak to your personal tutor about it. Alternatively, if you are feeling low and want a confidential and anonymous chat with someone who will listen, some universities run a NightLine.

6. Look at the flipside – Just think, since you miss home so much, imagine just how great it’s going to be when you go back to visit! Make a plan to go back and note it down. Look forward to returning for a bit of a catch up. In the meantime, occupy yourself with uni friends, study, societies, outings, and so on.

7. Get involved in local events – If you don’t have enough interest in what’s happening on campus, look to the surrounding local area for events, outings, and clubs. Local papers, tourist information centres and newsagent windows are just some of the sources for local happenings.

8. Get a job! – It might seem extreme if you weren’t planning on it, but getting a bit of cash in might also help you feel less homesick. With something else on your mind such as part-time employment, you tend to forget about homesickness (as well as many other things), so it’s an extreme step, but an effective one.

9. Confront your feelings – Sometimes your other emotions can disguise themselves as homesickness. Are you feeling anxious about your study? Are you stressed about your new surroundings? Are you scared that you have too much independence all at once?

If you have any worries such as these, it may not strictly be homesickness. There are many people you can talk to, including your personal tutor, your Senior Student/Student Ambassador and your Student Services. Communicating your concerns and worries in this way can help greatly and you should be given a lot of support too.

10. Invite your friends to visit – If you can’t go back home, bring a piece of home back to you! Invite a friend of two from back home and show them around the campus and local area. Engage with new uni friends at the same time if you can. Try to make this new surrounding a home away from home.

11. Invest in the power of the word ‘HOME’ – For some students, less than a single day passes before they are already calling their new digs ‘Home’. As an experiment, try referring to your room/flat/house as your ‘Home’. That’s essentially what it is, so it’s time to convince yourself. The way we word things and present them to ourselves can make a strong difference to our perceptions.

FP_PLH (photo by danzo08)

12. Write – One thing about writing…the more you do it, the easier it gets. So why not try writing a diary (or a blog like this perhaps) that describes what you’ve been doing? Describe the surroundings of your new environment, explain what you’ve been learning, describe the people, give life to everything around you.

And the more you write about it, the more passionate you can become about it. Good luck!

13. It’s okay to be overwhelmed – When you first arrive somewhere new, there’s usually a lot to learn. But university has so many new things that it can feel like you’ve woken up on the moon and don’t have a clue how you’ve got there! To add to the confusion, there are millions of things happening and not enough time in the day to be enjoying it all. In short, it’s a rather overwhelming experience.

However, THIS IS NORMAL! You’re not being slow and you’re not expected to be a superhuman individual who can pick up everything in seconds. If you feel like it’s a lot to be dealing with, you’re almost certainly right.

14. Develop a new comfort zone – Living with your family and having a good support network has probably been the norm for most of you. If you’ve moved away now, it’s time to rub your hands together and get ready for a new setup. Prepare yourself for this and you will develop a new comfort zone in no time. But dwell on your previous comfort zone and of course you’re going to find the new situation difficult to cope with. As they say, out with the old and in with the new.

15. It can take time, so don’t panic – The transition from home to new home isn’t quick for some people. If you begin to worry that it’s taking you too long to settle in, take heed in the fact that it can take a number of weeks before things begin to feel a bit more ‘normal’. It might take longer than a whole term/semester!

There’s no timer on you, so don’t impose any limits or tell yourself you’re never going to shake off the homesickness. Let things take there course and continue to be positive in your new experiences. I’ve known people to take months before they settled down, yet had the best time of their life since then. As they say, patience is a virtue!

16. Embrace reality – For some students, Fresher’s Week will have felt like one big party. There might have been no time to stop and think about what’s going on. Lashings of alcohol, loads of new friends and a shed-load of events can send the clock spinning so fast that the week is over in what feels like seconds.

And then what? Reality hits, taking you into unchartered territory. You’re slapped into a sobering outlook.

Yes, university is not one big party. There is work to be done too. There is such thing as sleep…you can’t get away without it.

With such a suddent jolt, it’s easy to think back to home life and how easy it felt compared to this. But that’s just the settling down that’s happening to you. Bizarrely, we sometimes mistake the gentle calming after such a great event to be an awful stress. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know why, and I’ve not read enough about it. But again, you’re focusing on the shock of the new. You’ve been given some time to think about it, but you would rather keep going with the non-stop fun.

Don’t worry, there will be plenty more fun to be had. The jolt is a shock, but there will be many better shocks to come that will more than make up for this.

17. Incorporate a hobby into your new surroundings – If you don’t have a hobby, try to take one up for a short period of time (you never know, it might even stick!). For example, you could do some photography within the local area and take in the sights. Or maybe you could go on a different walk each day to find out what’s around you. If you can incorporate an enjoyable pasttime to your area, you can grown an affinity with it much easier than when going in blind.

lonely man (photo by dduchon)

18. Invest in a webcam – If you want to keep in visible contact with friends and family, you can buy pretty cheap webcams for your computer these days. If you and your family set them up, you will be able to have video chats over the internet, which may help the distance problem. Just remember not to have conversations all the time, or you will continue to dwell on the homesickness!

19. Eat, drink, be merry, and rest on it – Keep a routine of eating food, drink plenty of fluids (of the non-alcoholic variety), enjoy yourself as much as you can, and don’t forget to sleep regularly.

All these things have an impact on the mind and body. If you ignore these vital things, you’ll end up feeling more cranky and homesick than ever. Treat your body well and your body will treat you kindly back.

20. Don’t build it up in your head – If you keep sitting in your room, thinking about home and recreating all those happy memories in your mind until you’re even more sad, then STOP IT NOW! Whenever you start to drift into these thoughts, the best advice is to get up, get out and find people to interact with. Maybe those in your communal kitchen, or maybe some people outside. Whatever you do and wherever you go, just make sure you leave the memories of home behind. They’re meant to be good memories of happiness, not thoughts to upset you. Put them to the back of your mind until you’re ready to revisit them with happy thoughts instead!

21. Keep exploring – The more you know about your new town or city, the more you will be accustomed to it.

For starters, learn your room and its layout. It is, after all, where you’ll be staying. It will be your new bedroom and life area, so familiarising yourself with this is a positive first step to banishing the homesickness.

Next, learn your new building. Whether it’s a house, flat, halls of residence, it doesn’t matter. Get to know it well. Get a feel for what goes on and how it’s used. You might find a particular kitchen or floor has all the fun and interaction. Try to incorporate yourself there if you can.

Explore the campus. Don’t limit yourself to the main areas and what you’ve already been shown. Give yourself a real workout and see what’s what. Even if you don’t revisit half the places again, at least you will have taken the opportunity to understand the overall outlay of where you’re going to spend a lot of your time over the next few years.

Further afield, check your local area. Invest in a local A-Z map if you haven’t already. It’s invaluable and might even give you the upper hand when planning an outing. Not everything happens just in the main town or city. It wasn’t until my final year when I realised that there was a whole different aspect to my local area…I used to only ever walk toward the city centre in one direction. In my final year, I found out that walking in the opposite direction presented all sorts of other places of interest. It took two whole years for me and my friends to find a whole new world on our doorstep. If you find out about it straight away, you can really get a sense of belonging…If you become a guru of your surrounding area and know more about it than your friends do, you’re bound to get a little bit of realisation that this really can be your new home.

Six (photo by woodsy)

Top ten tips for students???

A few days ago, the Daily Telegraph had a Freshers’ Guide. It had some good info, including an article on homesickness, settling in to uni. I was impressed with the article and think they make a good point. A worthwhile EduLink.

I was less impressed with their ‘Top ten tips for students’. I think it needs explaining and a few corrections:

1. Join everything
There is an overwhelming number of clubs and societies you can join. This blog has already covered the difficulty and confusion in joining up for too many different groups. Yes, you can use them to get to know new people, but overkill tends to cancel out any benefit and replace it with confusion. As Nottingham University’s SU Societies Officer suggested, you should check the list of societies in advance (if possible at your uni), go to your Freshers’ Fayre with an open mind and enjoy picking a few societies that should help open up the possibilities to you.

2. Don’t drop people you know from home
I see no problem in this. But it’s always up to the individual to do what is right for them. Don’t feel pressured by people from home who keep wanting your company if you are having a wonderful time staying at university with new mates. Always weigh up the pros and cons to each situation.

3. Don’t put all your social eggs in one basket.
Apparently you should “avoid getting too “in” with one crowd right from the start”. This advice makes it sound as if you’ll be too late to make new friends if you spend the first few weeks with some brilliant people who suddenly turn out to be not so brilliant.

I have spoken to others who have had a similar experience to my own. From personal experience, my best friends who I still maintain regular contact with now were not the first “in” friends that I had. Things change and university is pretty reliable at allowing those changes to take place. I aim to write a bit more about making changes like this at some point in the near future.

4. Get a diary
This is actually good advice if you can keep a strict marker of things. It works even better if everyone else around you can keep track in a similar way. Unfortunately, it’s not always this simple, but I do agree that having a plan of what you’re doing with your time can help your work/life balance and give you the opportunity to shape things without resorting to hours of wasted time, trying to remember when a certain essay is due in and when you agreed to go out drinking with some different mates.

5. Get real (i.e. off campus)
I wasn’t sure about this one. The main advice is to mix with people outside of the academic world.

To be totally honest, I didn’t do that and I don’t feel I’ve missed anything at all. Okay, so I may be biased in that my passions lie in Higher Education, but it didn’t get in the way of my life after university and I still had a lot of fantastic opportunities. I didn’t feel like the outside world had become alien to me!

6. Get yourself a flattering mirror
In a nutshell, boost yourself in whatever way possible. This is sound advice, strangely given. Try boosting your confidence with these tips from Ririan Project, TheSite, To-Done, and iVillage.

7. Don’t go home every weekend
The Telegraph article says “It’s running away and it panics your parents”. I agree with this tip, because you’ll be missing out on certain aspects of student life if you ignore the time when lectures and seminars don’t much happen.

Weekend at uni can be a strange affair. You never know what’s going to happen…sometimes nothing, sometimes the whole scene kicks off as if it’s the last day we have on earth. And a quiet weekend, especially an empty library on a Sunday morning, can work wonders for your study.

Of course, if you have a special reason for going home every weekend, then please don’t let us stop you!

8. Don’t get drunk more than once a week.
Well, that depends on the definition of ‘drunk’. If you drink alcohol (and it’s fairly likely, let’s be honest), you know it’s going to change your mind and body to an extent.

If you get absolutely slaughtered on a regular basis, then your status certainly won’t remain at ‘hero’ level. And if you can’t remember what happened each night, how are you going to be able to argue with that?

But if you end up drinking a little too much, most of your friends won’t even notice, because they will probably have had one too many themselves.

Of course, I’m totally ignoring the health issues regarding alcohol. That’s a different matter. But in terms of status, you’d have to be on a death wish to be deemed a saddo. A sign of approaching saddo status is regularly falling over for no apparent reason during/after a night out. Another is when you wonder how you’ve gone from ‘dressed and ready to go out at night’ to ‘in bed with headache and still dressed in the morning’ without any sense of time passing.

9. Do wash
Maybe I just went to a clean university, but I didn’t get the feeling there were many people who had a problem remembering what a shower and a sink was for. It didn’t stop them from using those facilities for various other purposes too, but we won’t go there…

10. Keep the booklet
Ah, I see. The Telegraph article has left the best advice for last. I, in fact, wholeheartedly agree that your student welfare booklet and any other welcoming/supporting gumph should be kept safely. You never know when you’re going to need it. And when most people need something like that, they haven’t a clue where to find it.

And if it’s a sensitive and personal matter that you don’t want other people to know about, you probably don’t even want to rely on the organised person who has kept everything.

Long-Distance Relationship: is it for you? – Part 2: Story Time

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After my first post on having a Long Distance Relationship (LDR), now I’ll tell you some stories about them, just to show how different the situations can be. I also have the EduLinks set up with loads of information and advice. Some of the advice may be conflicting, but lots of it falls on common ground. There’s no strict answer, but with a bit of reading up, digging deep, and working hard, you’ll at least be closer to getting the best out of your situation.

Now for a few stories. In no particular order:

1. Once upon a time, there was a couple. Let’s call them Active-Girl and Quiet-Man. They went to college together and started going out with each other a few months before finishing their exams. After college finished, they spent most of the summer together having fun and then headed off to different universities.

Active-Girl went wild at uni and made the most of every moment she could. When she wasn’t partying and socialising, she was studying. Meanwhile, Quiet-Man spent a lot of time in his room, missing Active-Girl’s company. He was going out with friends, but not with the same enthusiasm as Active-Girl.

Lucky for this couple, there was an easy train from door to door, so they could meet up (after the long train journey) every 2 or 3 weeks. Very quickly after a couple of visits, it became clear that Active-Girl wanted to take Quiet-Man out to see all her new friends and get involved in all sorts, while Quiet-Man just wanted to catch up quietly with his girlfriend and make the most of the short time they had together.

This couple wanted to stay in the relationship and to be faithful, but their needs had suddenly changed now that they were apart most of the time. So while they had good intentions toward each other, things were looking less promising.

The occassional visits were a marker for this couple and they hardly spoke with each other in between times. Fortunately, they realised this just in time and made a vow to e-mail and ring each other on a regular basis. In that simple vow, the relationship made sense again and they both lived happily ever after. All together now, “Ahhhh!”

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2. Another couple, Pocket-Boy and Clingy-Girl, were childhood sweethearts. They got together at a very early age and had a relationship that stretched far beyond romance. They were firmly best friends too. By the time university beckoned, they had been a couple for around 5 years already!

Then something very strange happened.

Before Pocket-Boy and Clingy-Girl went to uni, they mutually agreed to end their long-term love. There was no fuss or bother. They simply shrugged their shoulders and got on with being very good friends indeed.

And you know what? They did remain close friends and they had romances at uni too. And when Pocket-Boy and Clingy-Girl wanted to meet up again, Pocket-Boy would bring a girlfriend and Clingy-Girl would bring a boyfriend.

In agreeing together to call it a day, Pocket-Boy and Clingy-Girl found happiness in their university life and in their own friendship.

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3. Lady of Romance wanted to stay in her relationship with Mr. Ambivalent, even though they were going to be at opposite ends of the country to each other. Mr. Ambivalent agreed that staying in the relationship would be a good thing, despite the distance.

But when they went to uni, Mr. Ambivalent saw lots of gorgeous lady students who made his mind whizz about with naughty thoughts. And in all those nights down the Union and in clubs, drinking away happily, it seemed so easy to find these gorgeous lady students who were interested in him.

So he started taking one or two lady students back to his halls. Sometimes, they might be in the same halls too, which made things even easier.

All the while, Lady of Romance was having a good time herself, but minus all the interest in the opposite sex.

You’ll never guess what Lady of Romance decided to do one day…yes, she decided to pay Mr. Ambivalent a surprise visit! I think you know what’s coming next…you fill in the details.

After the obvious kerfuffle, and one slap in the face later, the relationship was no more. Lady of Romance was both happy and sad at the same time to have made a surprise visit to her EX-boyfriend. Luckily, her head was strong and she made a quick recovery. Oh yes, and she suddently started noticing lots of gorgeous gentleman students who made her mind whizz around with naughty thoughts!

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4. Fun-Guy and Great-Gal were in a steady relationship. Great-Gal was already a uni student and Fun-Guy was a local to the area. They hooked up, things were great, yada yada…

Then Fun-Guy announces that he’s off to uni too. But it’s a uni in another part of the country. Possible issues, thinks Great-Gal. And they don’t even get the summer together, because Great-Gal travels back home to her parents.

So the farewells are said a few months before uni takes place anyway. However, during that summer period, Great-Gal makes a point of keeping in contact with Fun-Guy. And Fun-Guy happily makes a point of keeping in contact too.

As Fun-Guy and Great-Gal keep in touch, they realise this might just work out.

And it’s true. It did work out. Regular contact made things work wonders. Even on occassions when there was nothing to say, they’d talk rubbish and be happy for the link. Bless!

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These situations were all different and none of them resulted in the end of the world, even if the relationship did come to an end. That’s the main point I wanted to make:

Whatever happens, remain strong and focused on a positive future.

It might feel difficult and you may think it’s easier said than done, but keep going and make the most of everything that you do. Dwelling in the past won’t help the situation, but embracing the future will benefit you greatly.

There are loads of different LDRs that I’ve been aware of over the years. Every one has a different story, as you’ve seen above by the examples. If you want advice on these complicated relationships, do check out the EduLinks Long Distance Relationships Special if you haven’t already. There’s plenty of reading material to help you work things out.

Good luck!

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