How Uni Has Changed My Perspective of Home

So Christmas has rolled around and I’m now back at home in good old Norfolk for the Christmas holidays (be prepared for the most bland Christmas Amy) don’t get me wrong I love going home and spending time with my family but I also love being at uni with my friends.

Currently I’m in my 3rd year of being away from home and studying at university, although I’m only in my first year at NTU I did two years at the University of Reading.

In my first year at Reading I LOVED my social life but I hated my academic life. I was finding it really hard to balance going out and socialising with uni so when it was time to go home for a half term it was sort of like a blessing in disguise (my liver really needed a break) it was the first time I’d been away from home for that sort of length so I didn’t really know what to expect. Everyone said that I would get homesick and be desperate to go home for Christmas but I was quite the opposite. Norfolk is alright if you live the Norwich side but unfortunately I live in a teeny tiny village and all it has to offer is a skate park that I stopped going to when I was 8.

After a while I felt that going home was a little bit of a chore, don’t get me wrong, I loved seeing and spending time with my family but it was just the whole process of packing up all of my stuff, getting the train and making the trek home that made it feel like a chore. Whilst at Reading I went through a rollercoaster of emotions and my perspective of home was constantly changing. In my first year I wanted to be anywhere but home and in my second I was begging to go home every-weekend.

It was a hard to time to say the least and by the time I’d dropped out of my second year I’d spent 95% of my time at home instead of uni.

One of the reasons I chose NTU was that it’s about an hour and a half drive for me to get back home, so it was far away enough to have my own space but also close enough if I wanted to go home. I was prepared to go home every weekend again but Nottingham really changed how I viewed home. I’ve got such an amazing group of friends here that when I leave them it’s like leaving another family (I mean we’ve all only been home for 4 days and we FaceTime everyday)

I’m always going to love Norfolk because that’s where my family are and where I grew up, going home is refreshing when I need it but also I think my family understands how much I love Nottingham too so they’re never too angry or upset when I chose to stay here than go home.