My First Day...

Kinda sounds like a kid talking about school, but I woke up today with a mixture of excitement and worry; what are my scary class mates going to be like in the flesh? What if they're all maniacs being hunted down by the men in white coats carrying tranquillisers? How will they react to me? And what of my tutors?

Before any of these worries could be resolved (or not) I had the issue of getting to university. This involves getting up at the ungodly time of 7:15, getting washed and dressed and ready to leave the house by 8:30 (at the latest), then hopping in my Fiat Punto and driving down either Romsey Road or the M27, with the obligatory spurts of road rage aimed at people driving too slowly (c'mon, who does 40 in a 60?). I then have to battle it out for a space in the student car park so I hit the button on my dash and aim the rocket launchers at people in my way. That's a lie. I must remember that journalists MUST NOT lie.

Commuting from Southampton every day doesn't really offer the best experience for Freshers such as myself; you're isolated from the day to day life of waking up and fending for yourself and you lose a lot of opportunities to go out and make friends. Luckily a large amount of students from Winchester go out in Southampton, so I can just meet them there, or not, as the case could be if they just plain don't like me.

Fortunately, the latter of the worries was put to rest fairly quickly when Chris said that the course was number 1 in the country for broadcast journalism, number 1 in the South and number 3 in the country for student satisfaction and also voted the best in the country by the British Journalism Training Council. Clearly, my career and my education were going to be in safe hands for the next three years.

As for the students, that worry extinguished within moments. It took a while for it to get through to me (considering the fact I'm commuting) that everyone here was in the same boat. Everyone was a Billy-no-mates. I was having nightmare visions of people knowing each other fairly well already, having had the chance to hit the Union on nights out and mingle with each other, but in reality this was far from the case.

With a quick welcome out of the way we were straight into the issue of timetables. I'm relieved to say that for now at least, my timetable is looking very nice. Not even the daunting issue of two weeks of straight shorthand can dampen my spirits, I just want to topple it and conquer the one hundred words a minute target. So far it just looks like Klingon to me, so hopefully all will become clearer soon!

After a lunch break (in which we had a short questionnaire to complete - what GCSE's do I have again?) we returned to the news room and were instructed on how to set up a blog. This is the result! Wow, doesn't it look FANTABBYTASTIC?! Well, no, not really, but with any luck it will do soon. The photo I chose for my background is one I used as a final print for my A2 Photography coursework, but I've had to lower the quality of the image so it would scrape under the ridiculous 300kb limit for a file size. That's a bit of a bummer. Never mind.

So as I sit here on my bed pondering what I'm missing out on, I'm reminded of what I still have here in damp and drizzly Totton. I'm only a 35 minute drive away from my developing friendships in Winchester and that I'm still in the local vicinity of my 'friends from home', oh and I don't have to pay for my own food or polish or hoover bags or tea towels or cups or drinks or well, anything. Always good to leave things on a positive note.