Giles Brooker Still Wants Flat.

Well, you've been orientated - or have you? - or did you really want to be anyway? How many of the functions arranged to make you feel 'welcome' and lessen the confusion of your first weeks at varsity really had any effect? There is no short cut to becoming a student. Just as it takes time for your hair to grow long enough, so it takes time before you feel at ease in the buildings before you find out where all your classes are and before you meet other students and make friends. People realize this and accept it as the natural outcome of a change in environment which can only be overcome in time.

For a few years now the Students' Association has been running "Freshers' Welcomes" with the misguided hope of helping freshers and staff to meet informally — to show that staff are only human, and to stop the freshers' initial shyness. But does anybody really care? Very few freshers ever come and even less staff members. Those that do listen to oft repeated phrases about participation and self-discipline and how nobody's going to make you work but you'd better anyway cause if you don't do enough essays during the year you'll fail terms, and then they all get served with suppers which this year cost the Association $270 The staff are usually bored and look upon the evening as a duty - few of the people they meet will ever be in their classes anyway, few of the freshers would meet more than three or four new people. And what's the point of meeting a senior lecturer in French if you're taking Sociology. Education and Anthropology. But few freshers would realize beforehand that not many staff would be there, so why didn't they come? Isn't it because the whole concept of a tea-and-cakes welcome sounds and is so very boring to most people.

What they want when they come to university are rock concerts, plays, folk concerts and dances. They want wine and cheese evenings, to smell the grass in the air - a bit of the free love and easy living they've heard so much about. And some of them even want to work. Maybe if each department ran a wine and cheese evening people would get better orientated, but tea and cakes when they could be sitting outside Frank Kitt's home with Tim Shadbolt just isn't on.

Orientation Controller