With independence comes a responsibility to look after yourself. Living on a diet of takeaways and pot noodles, although it might initially seem convenient, is bad for both your physical and financial health. There are 3 areas of your health to consider: your food, your fitness and your mental health. All of them are important but here’s some ideas for how to manage them at university.

1. Buy frozen fruit and vegetables. Often the hardest part of only buying food for yourself is making sure it is all eaten before it goes off. Frozen veg can come pre-cut or even in mixed bags to give you come variety and frozen fruit is excellent for making smoothies.

2. Experiment with your home cooking. Buying a recipe book and trying new dishes can be a fun way to eat healthier and become a much more successful cook.

3. Join a sports club, society or the uni gym. There are plenty of ways to keep active at uni through societies like dance or martial arts or by joining a sports team. Alternatively, you can just join the university gym which often has different deals for the level of activity you want to partake in.

4. Moderate your alcohol. Drinking culture is big at uni and there’s nothing wrong with partying occasionally. But drinking to the point of endangering your health is not worth the short or the long-term impacts. Don’t be that person who made their friends call an ambulance because they’d passed out. Remember: if you’ve ended up in an ambulance or hospital because you drank too much, you’ve potentially taken that time and care away from someone else who didn’t self-inflict their illness or pain.

5. Manage your stress levels and be aware of your mental health. University can be a very high pressure situation for some people and being aware of your stress levels and mental health is very important. Taking time out for meditation, talking to counsellors or just sharing strategies with your friends are all ways of approaching stress and mental health but the most important thing is to be honest with yourself and other people if you are finding things hard. You can even go as far as to take a break from university for a year part way through your course if you need it is always worth exploring your options.

6. Register with a GP and Dentist. If you have travelled far to attend university then registering with a new GP is important to ensure you can be seen if there are any health issues. The dentist is less vital as waiting lists can often be years long and the infrequency of appointments can mean you can arrange them for when you go home. But if you are an international student then registering with a dentist is probably still worth it.

Studying – it’s the main reason you come to university (or so you tell everyone)

But university study can be daunting. There’s new names for things like ‘Lectures, labs, tutorials and seminars’, the reading lists seem endless and the library is a mine of resources that make you feel like you’re wading through clay. So here are a few tips for adjusting to university level study.

1. Breathe. Everyone is in the same position and all of your lecturers and tutors were in that position once –they understand! Don’t put pressure on yourself to get everything right first time and ask for help if you need it.

2. Seek advice from those who know what they’re doing. Asking your friends about something you’re both unsure about can sometimes result in the blind leading the blind. You can talk to your lecturers, your academic tutor or a learning developer (contact learningdevelopmentfhm@lancaster.ac.uk) about any study related challenges instead and be confident of the right advice.

3. Alternatively, there will be workshops available throughout the year that cover things like ‘using the library’ or ‘referencing’ which can help you if you just don’t know where to start.

4. Look online! There are numerous study tips and advice online including our own student study blog.

5. Manage your time. Put time aside to do your reading, revise for your tests and write your reports. Writing a brief plan or draft can help you identify the gaps in your knowledge early enough for you to fill them and not be panicking the night before.

6. Be persistent! Independent study at university can be a lot to get used to but it gets easier with practice. By the time you reach your final year you’ll look back on your first year work and be amazed at the difference in quality.

Some people like to claim that freshers’ flu doesn’t exist. But as you will most likely find out – it does. Some get it worse than others but in the post freshers’ exhaustion, just as you are trying to knuckle down ready for work, the illness will strike. You’ll spend the first few lectures of university trying to hear your lecturer over the sound of 300 students intermittently coughing. It’s not the best thing about first year, but it’s a rite of passage. So here’s how to manage freshers flu.

1. Medicine and water. Like any illness you treat it in the same way. Sip your Lemsip, take paracetamol, rest and drink plenty of water.

2. Look after yourself. Sleep and eat as well as you can. It can be hard to find the motivation to cook when you’re feeling ill so making sure you have easy to cook things in the cupboard and plenty of fruit.

3. Call home if you need to. Sometimes hearing a family member’s voice can cheer you up and they’ll have some helpful advice if you need it.

4. Try to attend your lectures and seminars. Everyone is feeling rough but getting behind right at the start of the year could make the rest of the year more stressful than it has to be. Drag yourself up for an hour and you can go right back to bed once it’s over.

5. Take cough sweets, tissues and water to those lectures. There’ll be plenty of other people coughing but nothing makes you feel self-conscious like having a coughing fit in the middle of a lecture of 100 people.

6. Check up on your flatmates. Sometimes if people are feeling ill they might shut themselves away. It’s always worth knocking on their door occasionally to see how they are and ask if they need anything and hopefully they’ll do the same for you when you are feeling under the weather.

7. Go to the doctors. For most people fresher’s flu will clear up without much fuss. But if after a couple of weeks you’re still feeling ill then get yourself down to the doctors to get checked out.

8. Don’t let it dampen your enjoyment of uni. After the hype of freshers’ week and the buzz of going to your first lectures, freshers’ flu can give you the time to wallow and miss being looked after. It’s easy to decide that you’re not ready for independence or that uni is too much for you. So tackle that first illness and you’ll feel confident that you can handle the rest of university life when you’re well!

Packing for university is equal parts exciting, nerve-wracking and stressful. You will inevitably forget something and will probably still have a few items by the end of first year that you’ve never used. You will definitely end first year with about a quarter of the cutlery you began with and you’ll somehow acquire another person’s equipment and lose a frying pan. So here’s somethings I’d recommend that you bring with you.

1. Personal touches. They should be the first thing you put up in your room and the last thing you take down. It’s things like posters, photographs and cheesy decorations that will make your university room your own.

2. Storage boxes. Normally university rooms have a lot of storage crammed into them but you’ll always find there isn’t quite enough. Bring additional boxes or pop up shelves with you that can sit in the bottom of a wardrobe or under a desk.

3. Kitchen nicnacs. Don’t forget about things like a cheese grater, a tin opener or plastic Tupperware boxes. But even if you do forget, it’s likely that someone else in your accommodation will have them.

4. A door stop. Having your door open is a useful way of encouraging interaction in your flat.

5. Flipflops. Sharing a shower with an entire flat of people can make some people feel a bit uncomfortable so having flipflops to wear whilst you’re in there can make life a bit easier.

6. Hangers. Lots of hangers.

7. Fancy dress costumes. There will be many opportunities for dressing up that go way beyond freshers’ week and Halloween. Bringing a few props or accessories with you can put you in good stead for whatever themed socials you might encounter.

8. A mini sewing and first aid kit. Be ready for those sudden wardrobe malfunctions and the onset of freshers’ flu!

Ultimately whatever you forget to bring you will be able to buy or borrow from other people but it’s always good to be prepared!