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Clubs and Societies

Activities on Campus
As a student you will find a range of service and facilities at your disposal. In addition to academic facilities such as libraries and laboratories, most universities and many higher education colleges provide recreational facilities for their students, such as inexpensive restaurants or cafes, pubs, lounges, athletic facilities, and shops where you can buy basic necessities.

Student life can be as active or as quiet as you like. There is a huge range of activities to choose from, beginning almost the moment you arrive. Your first week should be spent getting to know the campus, finding out about essential services and meeting other students.

One of the best way to meet like-minded students and to broaden your horizons at the same time, is to join one of the many clubs and societies that all universities offer. During the freshers' week there will probably be an event where all the clubs and societies set up stands in the union building. They will advertise their clubs and try to get you enrolled into them.

Try not to miss this event, even if you do not intend to join anything. It is good idea to just look round at the diverse variety of things of which other students have seen fit to start a society. You will find the usual music and drama societies, the football and squash clubs alongside the less mainstream ones - the parachuting club, the windsurfing club and the rag society. The latter is a particularly good example of the eccentricity needed to join many of the societies. Members of the rag can often be spotted in town and city centres dressed as chickens or in nurse's outfits, jangling coins in a red bucket and trying to get people to buy their magazine in the name of charity.

It's always a good idea to join at least one or two of these clubs that take your fancy at the freshers fair, as they are not expensive, so even if you attend once or twice you don't really lose much. Also, it is much more difficult to join a club part way through the year, as everyone in the club will have already got to know each other, and you feel like a bit of an outsider, even though they do try and make you feel welcome.

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