Welcome To University! This is Your Life Now

As you come round from Freshers' Week, we look at the kinds of parties the rest of university has in store.

Photo by Sam Hiscox

The first rule of being a student is you're not allowed to drink unless there are rules. Rules are what separate students from people with actual drinking problems. I know that at this point, the sense of freedom and immortality that will come from going out five nights a week and surviving on the MDMA residue that collects in the corners of your wallet will seem like it’s forever, but it’s not. It’s going to end really quickly. And when it does, your opportunities to dress up in a neon tutu will be few and far between.

So, considering you just committed yourself to £27k (plus interest) of debt for a piece of paper that confirms you have read at least five books, you should take the free pass you're given to get as loose as you possibly can for the next three or four years of your life. There’s no room for pretension in university, especially during fresher’s week. No matter how much you shudder at the idea right now, you will find yourself in a bathroom with two other people, the walls vibrating with muffled bass drops, shakily pouring lemonade down the toilet so you can top it up with the bottle of Smirnoff you smuggled in via your pants; wondering how the hell you ended up at one of the following events.

From toga party to UV “rave”, there are very few people who manage to make it through university without being forced to dress up like an arsehole, so you may as well get it over with in the first few weeks when everybody’s capacity for retaining information is at an all time low. The thing nobody tells you about freshers' week is that you’ll be going through human beings faster than units of alcohol. By the time you’re half way through term, nobody will remember if you were the one who got ejected from Revolution for vomming on the shot girl. So, if you've never "done" fancy dress outside of Halloween then now is the time, because nothing levels a social playing field quite like forcing a large group of people to dress up in the same Primark animal onesies. Schools know this, prisons know this, and your student union representatives know this. In a room full of elephants, there is no “hot one”.

One thing you’ll encounter a lot of at university is love. Or at least, you’ll call it love, but you’ll soon realise that later in life, love doesn’t usually happen three times a week. Enter Traffic light parties: the most efficient and most debased way of compartmentalising a club full of strangers by the only piece of information they care about at that moment: relationship status. It’s clothing based, and goes a bit like this…

Red = you’re in a relationship that will almost definitely end before Christmas because you're like 18 and your bae probably lives on the other side of the country, but good on you for holding onto that youthful sense of hope.

Orange = you have one eyebrow raised in a sultry “come hither” manner and luring in everyone with a “bad boy/girl” fetish by dressing like a convict, but you’re not promising anything.

Green = you fully intend on ending your night in a stairwell with your pants around your ankles bonking to "Mr Boombastic" and you don’t care who knows it.

Got it? Good. Have fun completely ignoring it as reds get off with other reds, only to wail down the phone to their significant others in the communal kitchen afterwards. And beware the one guy who will pretend to be colour blind so he can hit on absolutely everybody.

University parties are a veritable who’s who of people who were almost kind of famous once. At some point, someone who used to be on Hollyoaks that didn’t quite make through the Game Of Thrones casting process will show up and DJ (press play, drink an entire bottle of complimentary Jagermeister and thrust inappropriately) in a club near you.

The best thing about these nights is that whoever is DJing is obviously only there because they’re skint. Jazzy Jeff did not end up on the university circuit through choice. They can be really hit and miss, too. You might get Barry off of Eastenders playing loads of Tom Jones and trying to slow dance with a load of 18-year-old girls, turning the night into an episode of Take Me Out that was too depressing to air. Or, you might get Goldie, who will show up and neck a bottle of vodka before soundcheck and then drive off into the night shouting "I'M GOLDIE!". Watching Coolio play “Gangsta's Paradise” 10 times in a row is only amusing in theory.

Before you actually go to university, Van Wilder and a collection of Daily Mail articles that use the word “offensive” ten times per paragraph will probably have formed your perspective on the kind of parties that go down. But the reality can actually be even more harrowing.

Carnage - an event that feebly describes itself as “probably the best night of your life” - has basically taken a house party out of the house, dressed it up in a £10 T-shirt, added a whole lot of rules, and spread it across a city centre so everyone can be offended by it. Doesn’t seem bad? It’s managed to get banned from advertising by 17 student unions and counting.

Mobs of teenagers with “I love cock” and “Boobies!” scrawled across their chests in permanent marker will stumble around town, someone will piss on a memorial statue for no reason, before someone middle-aged happens upon them and writes about the failings on youth in the local paper. Repeat ad infinitum.

Heaven forbid people actually enjoy living in the present, because if nostalgia lost its potency one of the UK’s grand clubbing traditions will be totally sapped of commercial viability. Cheesy music is something everyone from your granddad to your little sister can appreciate, so thank god some beautiful selfless promoter can be counted upon to provide the exact same playlist in the exact same club every single week for the next three years of your life. Also, on account of its universal appeal, the cheese night also has the added perk of attracting a super high population of “older gentlemen” who are really fun and not at all pervy.

This is one for all the people who think that all the stuff mentioned above is shit, but have no objective reason to think so because they’ve never done any of it. Still, because university is an ‘experience’ and all about trying new things, a great many people will reach a point where they feel that being slumped in a K-hole on a dirty carpet, while someone with low hanging trousers plays Spor’s “Aztec” to a room of about six people, is something they simply have to do.

The Summer Ball: where the wine comes in pitchers and the band comes from a one-hit-wonder compilation from the 90s. The night that a year’s worth of big, boozy nights were leading up to, the Summer Ball will make a point of being the biggest, booziest night of all. Fun activities include: trying not to drop your drugs down the portaloo, driving a bumper car while holding a bottle of wine between your knees, and repenting all your negative comments about Feeder playing because your intoxication has roused a new love for “Just a Day”.

However, because students are poor and pre-drinks are obvz essential, around 40% of you won’t even make it to the event. You’ll wake up in the morning with your hair extensions tangled in a nest on your head and a load of sick in your printer, which is totally not a thing that happened to me.

Follow Emma on Twitter: @SickBae