Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here.

BLOG #2

I’m going to quickly take this opportunity to apologise for the titles of all these blogs. There isn’t a story behind them and I don’t have an excuse for any of them, they’re just stupid. Anyway.

My decision to study abroad for a year was made on a whim. By November of my first year at university (only a month from starting) I compared my situation to the fantasy I had of being a film student who drank aggressively at night and wrote screenplays on a typewriter by day and decided I was having a shit time. I doubted my course was taking me anywhere, I was going through what felt like an endless break up and I’d been plonked in a house with a group of people who did little to extinguish my constant need to be entertained.

That sounds harsh and it wasn’t true for all eleven (eleven!) of my first-year housemates, but even those who I really got along with didn’t really help me drink or do anything else to distract me, which is of course the job of all your first year flatmates. Whether it was a relationship, an unreasonable obsession with work (everyone knows first year doesn’t count) or just a strangely negative disposition to social environments and being normal around new people, it became very clear that I wouldn’t be spending much of my university career with those that the Lancaster housing computer had dumped me with. This was only emphasised when walking past either of our neighbouring houses (our accommodation was organised into terrace-style houses, each divided into 12 rooms and a living space on the ground floor) to see them all snugged together lovingly watch a film or drunkenly partaking in a passionate conga.

(My first year flat)

Anyway, my dissatisfaction with the direction in which my time at Lancaster was taking, mixed with a reluctance to drop out quite yet led me to go to a presentation about studying abroad with the four occupants of my house that had such a year already included in their degree.

The idea, honestly, did not sweep me off my feet, but it definitely intrigued me enough to go to the next meeting, and the one after etc. In truth, I saw this as a route away from a potentially unhappy 2nd year in Lancaster- a viewpoint, I’d like to reiterate, that was based literally on my first month as a student. It’s hard to explain, it meant I had an option, if things got shit in Lancaster (and they wouldn’t) I could leave. It was this desire for something new, along with my panic in the face of Lancaster’s weirdly early pressure for students to organise housing for the next year that meant I kept saying yes to stuff. Even if I only half heard the question. Even if the 2:1 requirement meant I couldn’t drink away my first year of uni, although I tried my best. I had lazily decided in first term that I was not spending my second year at Lancaster and nothing was going to get in the way of my dedicated complacency to do that. That dedicated complacency was not even waived when I got an email that read:

‘Dear Nathaniel,

Following are the options that the study abroad programme accommodates for film studies:

• The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Regards,

Someone Personally Trying to Fuck You Over’

Underwhelming list. Nebraska it is, I thought. I could now begin to plan my year outside of England, away from the problems I thought I had, starting with trying to figure out where the fuck Nebraska is.

Ironically, what followed was two terms of slowly realising that I really didn’t need to stress so much because by summer not only did I have a first under my belt, but I was conga-ing out of my mind with my neighbours, who quickly became the only people I spent my time with. In fact, I’m going to end this blog in a lesson. The first lesson I want to proclaim is for first year students. If your first month is shit, flying to Nebraska is not your only option. The first month isn’t going to be what you expect, but your parents or siblings may be right when they tell you that university years are the best of your life.

It speaks volumes that the only thing that didn’t bode particularly well for me at this point was the fact I had a year in Nebraska staring me in the face.