As aspiring students get ready to make the transition to university, it’s timely to take a look back at the story of a typical first-year undergraduate from the class of 2014 in a characteristic regional Australian tertiary education hub.

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The pressure of being a fresher
By Kerry-Anne Wilderbeest
May 31, 2014

Manitoba can barely speak without erupting into a flood of tears! Her Reichian Gestalt Therapist has prescribed her sedatives to cope with depression and anxiety, and after this week it will only get worse.

The 23-year-old is one of thousands of first-year uni students who are careening headlong into what counsellors say is the toughest test of their academic careers – getting through their first end of semester exams.

Semester assessments may not seem at all daunting to those annoying little swotting tragics within the student body but to the less conscientious “party-animal” types, it produces visions of train wrecks and beads of sweat around the temples. According to the naturally warm and empathetic University of the Warrumbungles head counsellor, Dr Ethel Molestrangler, it is a flashpoint for many freshmen – when all the external pressures of starting a new chapter in life collides with the reality of coping academically at a tertiary level. Drop-out rates go through the stratosphere at this time of year, low-percentage subjects get ruthlessly dropped and uni counselling units become popular places for new undergrads to congregate.

DET figures show that about 75% of first-years are not sighted again after the end of ‘O’ Week, except episodically in the union bar. Of the 1800 freshmen who enrolled at UOTW in February last year, 1700 had stopped attending classes by Easter (200 of these however were members of the University’s Red Sea Pedestrian Walkers Club protesting against the sale of Vietnamese pork rolls in the University Food Hall during Passover).

“Things are really crook for me … I haven’t slept properly in about three weeks”, Manitoba moaned in a veiled reference to the poor quality of her Sealy Posturepedic, adding unhelpfully that that she needed to remind herself to phone the Bungles’ 40 Winks store to check on the mattress warranty.

At the beginning of the year, having jogged across Jogjakarta, Manitoba island-hopped all the way to the Warrumbungles to join her partner, Winsome Perving, and begin a degree in plant pathology. On top of trying to settle into a new home and earning well below the Henderson Poverty Line from her part-time night job as an exotic crops cultivator, Manitoba has to deal with the unfamiliarity of the Australian tertiary ed system. Having to bribe lecturers with dead fish to secure extensions on assignments has come as a real shock to a girl of her sensitivities.

Manitoba is desperate, this coming week she will sit three exams, two lab tests and submit four assignments as part of the first raft of assessments for her course. “If the University admino-fascists don’t allow my request to withdraw without penalty from half of my semester one program, I may have to chain myself to the Vice-Chancellor’s Rolls Royce … I want the entire administration to know that I’m fully prepared to engage in a futile and meaningless gesture if that’s what is required!”, she plaintively added.
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