The Student Survival Guide
What Nobody Tells You About First Year, and the Bits That Actually Help
Every guide to first year is written by somebody who came out the other side cheerful and has quietly forgotten the bad fortnight. This one has week six in it, plus the second-year house that gets signed in November after eight weeks of knowing people, and a chapter for the first years nobody writes for: commuters, mature students, student parents and the first in their family to go.
Not out yet. This page exists so the work is visible while it is being made, which is more honest than a placeholder.
What is in it
- The years you could have been born, and what a house, a week of work and a pound actually cost in each of them.
- What has changed since, with the figures rather than the sighing.
- The honest bits about the age, written by somebody not pretending it is fine.
- Quizzes and things to argue about.
- Things you can now say and get away with.
- Around forty pages to fill in, which is the part that survives.
Formats and price
| Format | Price | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Hardback | £16.99 | The gift version. Survives being kept. |
| Paperback | £9.99 | The one most people buy. |
| Ebook | £4.99 | Read it, but you cannot write in it. |
Part of Survival Guides, an Home Truths series.
Frequently asked
- Is this a book about how to study?
- No. There is a chapter on why university work is a different shape from school work, which is the thing nobody explains, but there is no study-skills content and no revision advice. The library has a floor of that and the department will tell you more about referencing than any human being wants to know.
- Is it full of drinking jokes?
- No, and that is deliberate. About a third of the people it is written for do not drink, and roughly all of them are tired of being the joke in this part of the shop. Freshers week appears because it happens, not because it is the material.
- What is week six?
- A bad fortnight that a very large number of first years have somewhere between week five and week eight, reliably enough that university support services can predict the queue. Five things land at once: the novelty goes, the freshers-week friendships thin before the real ones form, the first deadlines arrive, the money runs short, and it gets dark at 4pm. The book describes it properly and says what actually helps.
- Who is it for, the student or the person buying it?
- Both, and it is written to work for each. The buyer is usually a parent or grandparent who has already bought the duvet and the pans and wants one more thing that is not tat. The reader is 18, will read it in the car, put it in a box, and find it again in November, which is exactly when it is useful.