Homesickness: what can I do about it?
Everyone tackles homesickness differently. While many would have you believe they’re pant-droppingly confident, most people find themselves feeling adrift during the first few days at a new place.
Give yourself the best chance of settling in quickly, so here’s a quick action pack for facing the first days:
Pimp your pad
Whether or not you intend to spend any time in it, your room is one place you can take a little slice of the home pie. No two universities are the same and, while some places might provide you with a palatial suite and a bathroom big enough to play baseball in, others make cupboards look like castles. Still, it’s your place (within reason) to do what you like with. So here are Push’s nest-feathering suggestions:
- Personalise your pad with a few choice items from home. This doesn’t mean stuffing the place to the rafters with pencil shavings from your first day at school – there just won’t be room, and once you get settled in, your stuff will breed by itself.
- Bring your own duvet, bed sheet, pillow and so forth. Some universities provide bed linen, but more often than not you’ll want your own anyway.
- While you might not be able to paint the walls, most places will have somewhere you can pin up pictures, posters and the like. Invest in some white-tak (works like blue-tak, minus the tell-tale marks).
- Choose a few favourite photos of friends, family, next door neighbour’s cat, or whatever reminds you of life back at the ranch. If you can’t stick them up on the walls (or don’t want to), beg borrow or steal some photo frames. Discount stores sell clip-frames (a big sheet of glass clipped to cardboard or wood) for about a fiver, which are great for displaying a collage of favourite photos, memorabilia and the like.
- Bring Teddy. Go on, admit it, you do have one. And you can always pass off Mr Grizzlepaws as an ironic statement.
- Stock up on snacks - tea, coffee, biscuits – these all help to make your place feel ‘lived in’. They’re also useful bribes for potential new mates.
Get out more
You can pretty much take any group of 8,000 people of above average intelligence, mostly between 18 and 25, and leave them to it to have fun. That said, sometimes we need a little help to thaw the frost.
It may sound harsh, but hiding in your room is as effective for warding off homesickness as taking a jelly for a walk. Tempting as it might be to adopt the hermit’s approach to freshers’ week, get out and introduce yourself as early as possible. Everyone else will be feeling nervous to some extent and the longer you leave it, the harder it gets.
- If you’re ‘living in’, scope out the communal spaces in your accommodation. If there’s a common room, find out where it is (ditto the bar), so you can be the one leading the way there later on.
- Prop open the door to your room. People are more likely to come in and say hi if your room’s not bolted and barricaded.
- Come equipped with tea, coffee, biscuits and booze. They break the ice quicker than a pick-axe and making a brew gives you something to do besides make small talk.
- Ents, bops, pub crawls – whatever your university or students' union has lined up, hop on the party bus.
- Take care of your tipple – a gentle tipsiness can be pleasantly distracting, but there’s a fine line between bobbing on the waves and disappearing beneath them. Avoid getting so sloshed that you can’t remember the names of your new-found friends, let alone your own. Oh, and in case it needs saying, no one will thank you for a 4am trip to A&E.
And finally...be yourself. Everyone’s unusual in their own way, and hey, it’s your quirks that make you lovable.
Keep in touch
Flying the nest needn’t mean breaking contact completely. So before you change your name and destroy the paper-trail, get on the phone to the folks to let them know how you’re doing. They’ll want to know. Short of phoning home to tell them about your every bathroom break, it’s a good idea to let your friends or family how you’re doing. Especially if you need help.
Also in this section:
Homesickness: an intro
What is homesickness?
Where can I get help?
Last updated on: 15 July 2008