When Mia Novak left her small mountain town to study in a city on the coast, she expected the hardest part of her first year to be the lectures. In fact, as she explains in a talk she now gives to new students, the lectures were the easy part. What she had not prepared for was everything else: cooking for herself, managing a budget, and living in a place where she did not know a single person.
For the first few weeks, Mia shared a flat with two other students, both of whom were in their second year. They were friendly but busy, and they already had their own friends. "I spent most evenings in my room watching films on my laptop," she says. "I told my parents on the phone that everything was fine, but I was lonely, and I was spending far too much money on takeaway food because I didn't know how to cook." By the end of October she had used almost half of the money she had saved for the whole year.
Things began to change when a classmate persuaded her to join the university's sea-swimming club. Mia had never swum in the sea in winter, and she nearly gave up after the first session, when the water was so cold that she could hardly breathe. But the club met at seven o'clock every Saturday morning, whatever the weather, and afterwards the members went to a small café near the harbour for hot chocolate. "It wasn't really the swimming that kept me going back," she admits. "It was the café. For the first time, I was part of a group that expected me to turn up."
Through the club she met an older student who was studying nutrition, and the two of them started cooking together on Sunday evenings. They made large pots of soup and pasta sauce and froze them in portions for the week ahead. Mia's spending on food fell by more than half, and she found that she had more energy for her studies. She also began to keep a simple notebook in which she wrote down everything she spent, from bus tickets to coffee. "It was boring," she says, "but after a month I could see exactly where my money was going, and I stopped worrying about it."
By the summer, Mia had passed all her exams, two of them with high marks. She is now in her third year and helps to run a programme that pairs each new student with an older one during their first term. The pairs meet once a week, usually for coffee, and the older student answers questions about anything from timetables to washing machines. Her advice to those arriving in the city is simple. "Don't wait for friends to find you. Choose one activity, any activity, and go every week, even when you don't feel like it. And learn to cook three cheap meals before you leave home." The sea, she adds, is still very cold in January.
