Change here for the University line
#128* - a wet, wide-ranging and wearisome Welcome Week
Hi there,
Good to write to you all after a busy first week here at Imperial, and officially the longest time I’ve been away from home.1 The independence hits you hard and my command over my time, my food and my decisions. To reword a well-known saying, “with great freedom comes great responsibility”.
There have been a lot of induction events, from both the Maths department and the university, as well as the new experience of food shopping for myself, the tube, stocking my cupboards and a whole lot more. The course itself has been intense - 3 lectures and 2 classes in 2 days, and I’ve got a 72h-turnaround coursework this week!
Highlight of the week: my exciting Friday night. After finishing up on campus at 5 (and finally making some progress on Vector Spaces!), I travelled to LSE with 2 new friends for a great panel event after Spring Weeks…and the evening fun didn’t stop there! I grabbed a free coffee from Greggs (student offers!) and then went ice skating and bowling with my hall mates. Here’s a stunning building I saw on my way to LSE.
As I’ve tried to illustrate, this Freshers Week and moving to university has been a time of massive transition, which can be overwhelming. A ‘shock to the system’ was me realising I needed to shut down for the night at 11 and that my mum wasn’t going to come into my room to tell me to. 🤣
I re-listened to a podcast about change - Brad Stulberg on Deep Questions with Cal Newport (our Podcast of the Week too) - last week before making the move over and based on a big change now, here are 3 things I’ve realised:
Embrace that your identity is going to change
We think that when we experience change, we undergo homeostasis - there’s a disruptive event, we are unstable and then we return to change. We saw this during COVID when people said “when will things get back to normal?”.
What happened in reality was that we have a ‘new normal’ - more remote working, more Zoom calls and some people enjoying life a bit more. This is called allostasis - ‘stability through change’
This seems like a very fundamental point to begin on - but it’s important to prime the mind: “This first week is not going to be normal - you will have to cut corners, you will take wrong turns (literally and figuratively) and it will be tiring. And that’s ok.”
I’ve been asking myself, “how am I going to fill my weekends? There’s not much to do beyond ASDA shopping, laundry, calling home and meal prep”. However, after speaking to a few seniors this week, I’ve realised that I’ve failed to take into account that this weekend is the least work I’ll ever have - I’ll be desperate for my time around exams 😭
Similarly, you need to be open to adapting your life structure. A friend asked me “What are you going to replace School Captain with?”; the answer is that it won’t be anything explicit - I will have to find a way to ‘use’ the elements which I enjoyed (organisation, teamwork, leadership) in different ways but it won’t be as though it’s just a puzzle piece I can get a replacement for.
While in a state of instability and change, hold onto your core principles and activities, and seek to replicate them.
In an allostatic model, when a system is overloaded with distress and disorganization, it often seeks to borrow support. You see this in the body when one organ fails: there has to be regulation somewhere else in the body to make up for that. When you have instability in your own life in one area, 2 strategies are useful.
1. Lean into areas elsewhere in your life where things might be going well, to get your brain out of despair mode and 2. lean in your community and friends for support.
To put this concretely, in these past 9 days I have still
Listened to (as much as I could) the news, cricket and comedy podcasts that I listen to
Cooked food which I’m used to - like my Sunday morning egg with cheese bread
Gone to the gym, albeit just once
Written my weekly blog post!!
In these periods of change, it’s critical to keep some pillars constant and be ample in how much you use them to retain your way of life. They will help smoothen the slide into a new world, by almost being checkpoints to pause from the swirling storm of change.
Clearly, there’s a balance to be found between these first two points. If you feel you’re too far on either side of the scale, chances are you are. Talk to people around you, ask yourself what makes you feel that way and go from there.
Make it easier for yourself
As one 2nd year Maths student put it in our freshers group chat, “You shouldn’t be in your room if you’re not studying, sleeping or eating”. You need to be proactive in meeting people (we are social creatures who need friends and supporters), in trying new activities or exploring new places. Curling up into a ball like a touch-me-not isn’t going to help the feeling of change go away.
It reminds me of the ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response to stress and how that’s similar to the freeze response, not knowing what to do, failing to meet people and it can go into a negative spiral very quickly.
In the spirit of more examples - I had the 2nd half of a delicious (if I can so myself) dish I made yesterday to heat up and devour. Having not watched any TV this week, I had my laptop ready to start a new series.2 When I went into the kitchen, there was my neighbour, our hall senior and one of her friends. I initially thought “I’m tired, it’s been a long week. Let me just heat this, go back to my room and eat in peace".
However, me showing my fish to my hall senior (we’d spoken about it yesterday) prompted a big response from her friend and I ended up choosing to eat dinner with them → a 1h+ lovely conversation about all sorts of stuff. I really enjoyed the company and it’s given me the inspiration and energy to thread together today’s post (whereas I was staring blankly when I opened Substack up at 7)
Now this is why your daily dose of Adi’s stories is late, but it was clearly worth it. In these times of change, our decisions should err on the side of ‘divergence’ - trying new things and meeting new people. It will make the change easier.
There we go, a post about how to move well into university. Hope all my friends who have begun new adventures this academic year have found them to go well too!
Podcast of the week🎙️
As promised, you can engage in further reading (look at me getting my university terms out already!) on this topic of changing successfully here.
Thing I’m grateful for this week 🙏
Harry, a technician at my halls who fixed our flush on the day I reported a fault - very lucky to have such good service.
Quote of the week 💬
“By seeking and blundering we learn” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Bracing for impact ahead of a packed first week - lots of Maths, lots of club/society first sessions. But hey, it’s a lot more exciting than September was - so I’ll enjoy it! I hope you find enjoyment in your week ahead too.
Adi
Although I did end up meeting Mum who was down in London for an awards night
Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams Season 2 for anyone interested, fabulous reviews