On the first day of O-Week; I was awkward, nervous and terrified of talking to girls. By the end of it? I was awkward, nervous and terrified of talking to girls. Why’s that? Because O-week is literally a five-day period. And you don’t change in a week.

Call it a generation-wide penchant for drama, but we uni students tend to put a lot of weight on things that actually don’t matter at all. So ease up and relax, here’s why your O-Week won’t play as big a role in your uni experience as you think.

Your Personality Doesn’t Change In A Week

As I mentioned, O-Week is one week long. What did you accomplish this week? The only thing I think I managed was figuring out how to whip and nae nae – and I was two years late.

The fact of the matter is, change doesn’t happen that quickly. Even if you’ve moved to a new city, and are pushing hard for an ~ edgy uni reinvention ~, I can guarantee you it will take longer than a week for you to believe in your new personality, let alone for others to.

So why throw all of your coolness eggs into the O-Week basket? Just don’t be a dickhead and leave any bad impressions, and you’re setting yourself up well.

It’s A Great Week For A Specific Type Of Person

I’m not sure about this, but if I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that Ferris Bueller probably didn’t have much of a problem transitioning from high school to uni. Just a hunch.

Ferris Bueller was also charismatic, extroverted, and looked like Mathew Broderick in the 80s. All of these things worked to his advantage. But we can’t all be Buellers. Luckily, on a spectrum between Ferris Bueller and Michael Cera’s dorky characters of the late noughties, most of us fall somewhere in the middle.

We middle-dwellers won’t have an Animal House/Project X mash-up of an O-week. For us it will look closer to Superbad, but it’s at uni. And that’s if we’re lucky. Buellers will have a great O-Week. As for us? That brings me to my next point.

Uni Experiences Happen During, You Know, Actual Uni

During Year 12, was the thought of totally nailing the climactic shot in a beer pong comp on day two of arts camp what kept you going? Or was it maybe getting a degree from a good uni and getting qualified for your dream career?

If it was the latter, then ding ding ding, congratulations! You win the title of well-adjusted, normal person. Why do we delude ourselves into thinking that O-Week will be a monumental, life-altering week? This is just Schoolies 2.0 in disguise. And I think we all know how that week turns out.

What’s more important than the week before uni is the entire degree that comes after it. The people you meet in classes, the clubs you join and the courses that change the way you think.

Friendships Don’t Form That Quickly

Unless your friendship was forged in the fires of Flanders, you’re not going to become friends with someone after just one week. It takes a semester of laughing at tutors who use corny icebreakers, discovering shared interests, and borrowing each other’s notes. Sorry, but there aren’t really shortcuts to friendship.

Hi-fiving someone for shotting a Jaegerbomb could well be the start of a beautiful friendship, but “The One Where They Meet While They Drink At O-Week” doesn’t really sound like a classic Friends episode, does it?

(Lead image: Superbad/Columbia Pictures)