So the day finally came - I packed up my suitcase (yes, I only had one, because of the plane allowance), woke up at 4 am, went to the airport and took off, on my way to Oxford. It took me about 6 hours from the Prague airport to the Porter’s Lodge of St Hilda’s College.

From the very first moment everyone was really friendly and talkative, so the initial worries about not being able to talk to anyone and about finding it hard to make friends were gone very soon. Not very many people had arrived on the Sunday like me, but after we had unpacked and settled in our rooms, we went to eat ice cream in a local gorgeous coffee shop, then we had an informal Freshers’ dinner with some of the second years, and the whole day went by very quickly. 

On Monday the rest of the people arrived, a whole lot of new faces on the college grounds and in the corridors. The University had prepared an orientation programme for international students, so that is what I attended from the early morning until early afternoon - it was an event packed with information about life in Oxford in general. The rest of the time that day we were going around meeting various people - it’s a shame that it is literally impossible to remember everyone’s names!

The highlight of the day was probably a musical performance in our on-site music building, where the most talented music bands of the University were singing - including Out of the Blue (whom you might know from the latest Britain’s Got Talent show!!) who were simply amazing! A big clubbing night was taking place on Monday (and on most of the other nights of the week), but I did not go to any of them as I was feeling quite overwhelmed and tired by everything.

For those of you, however, who really like clubbing, don’t listen to the people who mock Oxford by saying that our Freshers’ week consists of playing chess and drinking tea - that simply is not true (although if you would enjoy that, you can surely find others here who would, too ;-))! 

After having registered with the university, the college, the doctors and having listened to various talks on Tuesday, we had a more or less free day, which then therefore included a lot of shopping a lot of chatting and meeting new people. In the evening I went for a walk around Oxford with some of my international friends, and then we stayed in one of the rooms in College and were talking and simply had fun! 

Wednesday was our very first formal dinner - we had to wear academic gowns to meet with our tutors, and then we spent the whole evening in the dining hall, talking to them about various things. Although I was worried that the dinner would be awkward, it was a really nice way of getting to know our tutors, whom we will be seeing very often now. Also, the food served was absolutely delicious! 

One of the great events of the Freshers’ week was the Freshers’ Fair that we had on Thursday - there were about 400 different university-wide societies/commercial companies all very keen to get our e-mail addresses and give us a lot of free stuff in exchange. I signed up for a huge amount of societies, because it was so hard to refuse once their representatives started talking to me! We also had a college Fresher’s Fair on Saturday, where, in turn, all the college societies were represented and where we got very beautiful free mugs with our college’s name on them! 

On Thursday we also met our tutors for the first time and we already got assigned relatively huge amounts of reading and problem sheet solving, so it seemed like the Freshers’ week was over. However, most people still found time to go clubbing on that night and to go to a college family dinner on Friday.

To explain a little bit about this, in Oxford, normally two second year students from a college get “married” and get assigned two or so Freshers, who then become their college children. Our college parents are then our first point of contact for any issues we might have. To get to know them a little better, we each had our Friday dinner in our college parents’ house, which was really great fun! 

The Freshers’ week (or the 0th week as we sometimes call it) officially ended with the Saturday evening’s bop. You probably do not know what such a bop is - but in short it is a themed dress up party that happens every two/three weeks in Oxford colleges. Our bop theme was “dress up as your subject”.

Many people wore really beautiful fancy costumes that took them a very long time to make and that really did impress everyone. I, for PPE, had a t-shirt with a question mark (for Philosophy, as it includes asking a lot of questions), an exclamation mark (for Politics, as politicians like to dictate to others) and a dollarmark (for Economics, for obvious reasons). The bop was a very fun event and it was a perfect way of ending the busiest week of our lives, the Freshers’ week!

Zuzana studied A Levels at Bellerbys College and achieved three A* grades (Economics, History & Maths) and two A grades (French and Government & Politics).

First of all, let me say that I am very thankful to Bellerbys College for giving me the opportunity to share the experience of my first year at university with you on this blog.

My name is Zuzana Chlupackova, I'm 18 and I come from a relatively small country in Central Europe, the Czech Republic. I was postponing my first blog post until now, because until the A Level results day I was not sure which university I would go to. But now I can finally say that from October I will be reading PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford University, and I am very excited about this!

As this is my first post ever, I was thinking to introduce myself and, most importantly, talk about the time I have spent in the UK so far, so if you feel this could be of any interest to you, read on :-).  

I was born in Vyskov, which is a small city in the Czech Republic and I lived in a tiny village called Olsany for the first year of my life (people are often surprised by this, since they say I am such a city type :-)). My family moved to Prague soon after and that's where I lived for the most part of my life.

The Czech educational system is different to the English one, so you might find it rather confusing that after the 5th grade at school I went to a selective gymnasium (an equivalent of grammar school), where I spent further five years before leaving to study in Bellerbys College Brighton in September 2009.

Before I first came to the UK, I was worried about pretty much everything - will I be able to cope with studies in English? will I make friends in an environment where I won't know anyone at first? How am I going to survive without my parents being far away? Well, if you are anything like I was, worry no more.

I'm not going to lie to you, I was homesick at the beginning, but within a few weeks I settled in very well. I didn't have to worry about not understanding English because the teachers spoke very clearly and were always willing to help. I made friends very quickly with people all over the world. And since I had internet in my lovely host family, I could contact my family on a daily basis, so sometimes, I didn't even have time to start feeling homesick. And besides, any worries I had, I could always either come to any of the teachers, or the lovely Mrs Chris Arulraj who was always there for us (thank you Mrs Chris!).

Although it really was my dream to get into Oxford University, I felt it was pretty much impossible at first (well I still feel it's a little impossible, since it still didn't quite sink in). But Bellerbys has showed me that with determination, hard work, and support from all the friendly teachers, everything was possible.

Here I must thank Mr Corcut for holding the Oxbridge meetings throughout the first four terms of my course, because they really were very useful in terms of preparation for the dreaded interviews. Thanks to these meetings the interviews went much better for me than I would have thought (If you'd like to know more about the interviews procedure, just let me know below in the comments, I could make a post about these). They were not easy, but they were not as daunting as I thought initially.

It did take a lot of hard work throughout the two years that I spent at Bellerbys. But do not be mistaken! I also had huge amounts of fun meeting various people, hanging out with friends (even studying with friends in our favourite Costa Coffee was fun!), singing in the college singing society, helping to manage various fun events for the college (the Carnival, the May Ball, etc.) in the Student Council, and so on.

Life of a student at Bellerbys is not just about studying (although this is massively important, of course) it is a lot more, and in all honesty, I think that all my friends at Bellerbys have enjoyed their courses just as much as I have (that is to say a LOT!).

So yes, this was a very brief summary of my life at Bellerbys Brighton. In the next post I will talk about my holidays (which are rather long - more than 3 months in total!) and about the preparation for university that I am faced with these days. If there is anything specific you would be interested in, I am more than happy to talk about it, so, please, let me know.

Thanks a lot for reading my first blog post!

I will be back soon!

Zuzana

Zuzana studied A Levels at Bellerbys College and achieved three A* grades (Economics, History & Maths) and two A grades (French and Government & Politics).