HOW TO SURVIVE THE FIRST WEEK OF UNIVERSITY LIFE

The first good thing you can do for yourself is forget all your past accolades. 

Somehow everyone who gets admitted to Unilag was either the “head boy or head girl” of their secondary school and “carried 1^st from JSS1 – SS3”, you’ll see for yourself soon enough. 

Howbeit, one thing everyone eventually realizes is, University life is a different game entirely, some early enough, others after first semester year one deals them a mortal combat fatality combo. You can be the overall winner of cowbell mathematics competition and bag an F in FSC 114 (Maths), it stems from a load of bad decisions you make from your first week on campus.

1.      Staying far away from campus: ideally you should either be on campus or within a 5-minute drive radius. The reason: classes will be terribly stressful until your body adjusts. Its no more secondary school where you have all your lectures in a small pod-like confinement in a 1-plot school premise, you might even need to take cabs to meet up with some of your lectures. When the day is done, you go back into that monstrosity called Lagos traffic, you get home late and you go to bed straight away – next morning: Repeat! There’s no time to read.

2.      Postponing your reading: ahhh! The best of us fall into this trap, year after year. Again, this isn’t Jamb – there’s no Special Centre, and it’s not civic education where you read a day before exam and score 120/100. Follow the lectures as they go, do your best at least not to fall far behind the class.

3.      The whole material and Tutorial brouhaha – my first day in class, I spent the entire 2K I came with buying “important materials”. It still hurts, I never used them! From Monday – students receiving lectures at DLI especially will witness the throng of all sorts or people who come in-between your class periods and sell you every imaginable kind of book with strong testimonies, see, take a deep breath and ignore them, of course you’ll see a lot of your guys patronizing but don’t be peer pressured – all na scam!

4.      Thinking the lectures aren’t important – no! its still too early to start stabbing class. Some lecturers like for you to give them their notes verbatim, some will give clues to their exams in class, don’t try to be unfortunate with your year one.

5.      Sugar rush – you’ll begin to see it; peer pressure will cause some to fasten themselves to the “populars” like ant to sugar. Those things don’t last, they’re not worth it all. Carefully select your friends from the crowd, possibly wait on it and observe, not even everyone in your department ought to pass as your friend, your clique will most probably affect your GPA range. Peer pressure can cause a horrible first week. You don’t even have to dress to impress anyone, check guys from 200L above, what they wear to lectures are mostly shorts with slides – now that’s not to say you can’t rock your brogues or oxfords but don’t go overboard for clouts. If you’re bad with writing, make friends that can borrow you notes, notes matter around year 1 – forget the foreign textbook your dad got you.

6.      Getting a seat in class - this one, honestly sometimes feel like a race into heaven, you get to class 7.30am for an 8.00am class – way, early right? Wrong – the class is filled up and you only manage to get a corner seat at the back. Try to sit in front, so you can hear properly. Some lecturers tend to talk more to themselves than to the class.

7.      Lost but found – a lot of things will get lost, except that they won’t be found. You should police your bag, notes, and phones. If you’re not so good at being vigilant then maybe you should leave your very valuable items at home for some time, at least until you learn the environment.

8.      The Party Life – think of it, would you waste the rest 50-60 years of your life with just 4-5 here on campus. There’s always this “I’m free now to do whatever I want, I’m legal bla bla...” you’re not free, you’re responsible to yourself and to your parents who are probably working extra shifts to see you do well, you don’t and you shouldn’t attend any parties that takes you outside the school premise – even if its tagged as a freshers thing, if it was transparent it’d be done in the school, think about it!

Lastly, university makes you who you’d be for the rest of your life, it makes or mars, don’t be without love and if you already are a lover of God and his son, then don’t stop! Here on campus, the community of believers is a very strong one. No I’m not asking you to seek religion, I’m saying God can be found, he is very real, you might have heard stories of the whoredom and perversion that is Unilag, but I bet they’ve never told you about Friday nights at Amphitheater, of how much powerful God is in Unilag. We are one of such community of believers, we are Christian Fellowship International (CFi) and we welcome you to a journey into knowing the true love of God.

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Reach us: 08183842713, 08184957813, 08126185532, 09039503894, 08132877890. 08162520193.

officialcfiunilag@gmail.com, cfi_unilag@yahoo.com   

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