Stop ignoring the truth: Freshers are adorable

If you’re approaching third year, you probably think you hate freshers. Everyone does. We hate them when they take OUR seat in the library and when we’re on the bus drinking coffee before an all-nighter and they’re chugging vodka, screaming for you to be the 14th person on the back seat of the bus. However, we all need to realise we’re wrong. Freshers aren’t annoying, they’re adorable. They’re fun, enthusiastic and exciting: everything we’re not.

For starters, at least they dress better than us. Yeah, there are a few who might still be wearing supermarket jeans their Mum bought them three years ago, and the rest look like they’re vying for a place as an extra on Geordie Shore, but so what? Doesn’t it hark back to simpler days when 9am lectures were a thing of myth? And anyway, they’re the ones who are going to look less ridiculous in photos in ten years time.

Maybe we would cheer up if we spent more time with freshers instead of bitching about them with our boring third year friends. You know the ones: the people who spent a wild Saturday night in discussing internship programs. Freshers haven’t been dragged kicking and screaming into the real world yet. That’s why only a fresher is going to want to add you on Facebook within ten minutes of meeting you just because you went to school within twenty miles of each other, or because you had a Tamagotchi ten years ago, just like them.

Fuck me, I miss being a fresher

Of course, we’re way beyond joining trivial societies now, but that doesn’t mean we should look down on the wide-eyed first years chattering at the fair about how they’re involved in everything from hip hop dance to musical gardening. At least they’ll be able to grow their own food when they graduate and don’t have enough money to buy any.

Being older, we often think our nights out are superior because we’ve now lived in our uni towns long enough to know the coolest spots, but we’re wrong. Any one who comes out the other side of paying £50 for a Freshers’ Week pass only to spend an hour queueing outside Tiger Tiger before dancing to the best of Kavos 2K12 while being drowned in foam and still thinks they had the BEST TIME EVER obviously knows more about clubbing than us.

Let’s face it, we don’t hate freshers: we’re just jealous: Jealous of their freedom to get up at 3PM on Fridays and go to McDonald’s in pyjamas. Jealous of their freedom to have a one night stand with that blue eyed rower who keeps making cheeky eye contact, without facing the wrath of a friend who allegedly had a thing with them for a couple of weeks in first year. Jealous they can gorge on gourmet junk food because they haven’t yet turned fat from subsisting on drunken takeaways for nine months, and don’t have a £1000 overdraft to pay back in a few months.

If we’re not careful, our jealousy will blind us from this simple fact: life is simpler, freer and better when you’re a fresher. Just look at them when they run around on their bar crawls with their childish haircuts and colourful trainers. We may never be that adorable again, but at least we had our turn. It’s their go now.