Living with your parents
A realistic Guide to life at UCLan - written by students!
By Tara Allen, 3rd year, BA (Hons) Public Relations
Throughout my first and second year at uni, I decided to live with my parents and commute into university for lectures and seminars. I decided to do this as I am originally from Preston, could commute on to campus and so that I wouldn’t have to pay for accommodation costs in halls.
In the first few days of starting at UCLan, I originally found it quite hard to make friends, as people had already forged friendships with the people that they were sharing halls with, they lived near each other or had been on ‘Flying Start’ together. This made me ‘step out of my comfort zone’ and assert myself in speaking to people and getting to know the people on my course. It was quite scary at first but then I realised that we were all ‘in the same boat’ and perhaps even worse for them, they lived miles away from home whereas I could still see my friends and family often as they were in Preston too.
However, I could have made more of an effort to socialise out of uni with friends from my course and from across the university as a whole, as I mainly socialised with friends that I had already, meaning that I missed out on some of the social aspects of university life. Perhaps another way of getting to know people would have been to join a club or society via the student union which I didn’t really pay much attention to at the time but have since heard great things about.