When you’re about to start your fabulous bachelor degree at the prestigious University of Opportunity in the city of Bright and Not Depressing Future, you do some googling.

Unfortunately, the top hits are articles like, “What to Avoid To Not Fail Your Life!” and “How To Not Die Of Bad Uni Things!”, amongst many other Yahoo answers of how to know if it is in fact genital herpes. So you curl up into a pathetic ball of anxiety and cry until your second year (like, at least).

Well, don’t do this. Listen to us instead.

No Pressure!

In your first year, the phrase “P’s get degrees” is something you can actually practise without looming unemployment and poverty dangling over your head. There is literally no pressure to do well this year!

Your results in your first year of a bachelor literally, literally don’t mean anything at all. Sure, they contribute to your GPA, but you have sixteen more classes to correct that! The HD that you spent weeks away from your friends to get? Just as valuable as a Pass you whipped up the night before, after going camping with the sexy dude from Screen Literacy.

Drink goon! Throw toilet paper on something! Wake up on the beach at dawn smiling!

New Friends!

Truth be told, I can’t be as enthusiastic on this point because I’m an antisocial cynic and made a total of four friends across my bachelor, but they’re still pretty great! You’re suddenly surrounded by people that share a huge common interest with you!

Matt Stone met Trey Parker in his first year at uni, so odds are your own Trey Parker is probably sitting a lecture theatre somewhere waiting for you. A mate of mine made friends with a big group of peeps in her first year, moved in with about six of them halfway through, and are miraculously still very close. They make art stuff together now and I’m incredibly jealous.

New Hobbies!

During orientation week, there’s generally a bunch of clubs looking to sign you up. Since you’re in your first year, you have almost unlimited time on your hands so you might as well take on a new hobby.

Join the Russian Club! Join the Cheerleading Squad! Home Brewing! Ceramics Association! Pogo Club! It’s your first year of uni, go fucking crazy!

Learning Stuff You Want to Know!

Because you don’t have to worry about getting high grades or getting internships or the future in general, you can just focus on learning cool new things. You can take a unit in photography and love it so much that it becomes a large part of your identity. You can be so into social science and suddenly have all the resources you could ever want available to you to be your best self.

Sure, uni is a pretty great time for the whole three (or more) years, but at the end of the day, it’s pretty stressful. Learning is fabulous when you don’t have to worry about the implications of not being able to afford an unpaid internship, or whether or not your grades will get you into that fancy Masters degree.

But the first year is the most magical part of the whole thing, and you shouldn’t be worried in even the slightest, it’s a fucking treat. You go, muchacho!

Pasha is a Film and Television Animation student at Swinburne University of Technology. She spends most of her time playing with plasticine in the dark and can be found on Instagram at @pashrashy.