As a fresher joining Makerere University, the first advice I get from my parents is to read hard and make it in life. I listen in silence. My father takes me a side, remembers a few things. He says when kids go to university, they spend their valuable time loitering and doing unproductive things! He then warns me against dancing myself lame, saying the main dance will come sometime in the future. “When you read hard, the rest will come your way,” he says as he pats my shoulder. As a fresher, you have been longing for that freedom to do whatever you need without the fear of your father seeing you or noticing it from their parental instincts. Freshers are doing nothing to be more exact. They spend much of their time eating, gossiping and laughing. There is nothing like reading in the first days. Since there is no serious business in the lecture room, I spend most of the time surfing. I see many of my former classmates hurrying for the nightclubs. I want to join them but I remember my father’s advice. My roommate, Ronald is in his third year and he is quite busy. I sit in my room and doze off a bit since majority of my friends are out having their thing. They call it hanging, another polite word used for wasting time. Then there is class difference. Many university students are expected to be pretty classy. Classy in the sense that they have to show off. Whereas some can afford to maintain this expensive lifestyle, majority have limited resources. They borrow from others, to show that they are also ‘around’. You get the point? The wretched of the earth go and eat from kikumi kikumi. But girls are doing it undercover because they don’t want their boyfriends to know it! I have also seen very loaded boys. They drive expensive cars. However, there is a story that some take bank loans, buy cars to impress girls! But sometimes, reality catches up with them as their pockets become empty. The word impress is so common here. Of course there students who are here to read and not to impress but since the lecturers haven’t given us anything, we have no option but to sleep. Getting used to the new life at a university seems exciting transition but I have come to realise that it’s quite far from that. The freshers face the hard reality of appearing like little know-nothing-toddlers. To make matters worse, it turns out exactly that they barely know anything, talk of bitter truth. The memories of how proud it would feel to be a senior six candidate are all buried in one’s miserable mind. Freshers you find telling every body how bad they feel for missing ‘good’courses. “I wanted to read law but here I am studying Urban Planning,” one student laments. Ends
