Welcome Week: Day 4: A First-in Family, Mature Student's Reflection on the Transition from Workplace to University
By Matthew Simm
When I stepped onto campus for my first week, I wasn’t arriving straight from A-levels in a car driven by parents who knew about the kind of university life I was about to embark on. I was entering university as a mature student after several years in the workplace, with a mixture of shift work and structured 9-to-5 job experiences. I was also the first person in my family to attend higher education, which therefore meant that I had no family blueprint as such to follow, or advice to keep in mind. While my real-world experiences and added motivation in pursuing my degree were beneficial, navigating the initial transition felt like entering a foreign environment that involved an unspoken set of academic norms and expectations.
The first hurdle was the sudden shift in daily routine. In employment, my days had defined boundaries, clear expectations, and structured responsibilities. Transitioning to university meant managing vast blocks of self-directed activity and study, which was quite a culture shock. At the same time, Welcome Week felt largely designed for eighteen-year-olds. While I adapted to icebreakers and schedules that centred around freshers’ nights fairly well due to my extroverted nature and the fortune of knowing some people ahead of arrival, I know of fellow mature students that felt like outsiders. I’ve since discovered that there appears to be a decent amount of helpful information and mature student-centric initial sessions advertised on the university website. However, these sessions seem to happen in the week before many students arrive. And the concept of needing to seek everything out during a period where there is already an overwhelming amount of information to digest isn’t ideal. Therefore, I think it would be extremely beneficial if mature and first-in-family students routinely receive more targeted information and advertising for things that are relevant to them directly to their email inbox. I think that initial sessions should offer a tailored orientation track which focuses on practical transition support, even if it means being encouraged to arrive a week early.
Being a first-in-family student meant I didn’t have the luxury of leaning on parents or siblings to demystify higher education. Academic conventions like referencing, long-form essay planning, and decoding assignment briefs and feedback felt foreign to me. Even basic practical strategies: the smart productivity ‘hacks’ that traditional students often pick up through family advice or recent educational experience, had to be learned the hard way. For instance, I wish I had learned earlier about the necessity of figuring out what study techniques my brain responds to best to obtain more of a feeling of parity with my peers. Whether it’s in terms of trying pomodoro timers and various productivity apps, making proper use of calendar apps by mapping out important routines, dates, and deadlines early on, or with time management methods such as calendar blocking / time boxing.
After years away from formal education, every unfamiliar expectation elicited a feeling of academic imposter syndrome. There were academic skills workshops that were of help to me later down the line, but they were more advanced workshops that were useful for all, not just non-traditional students. I feel like I wasn’t really pushed in the direction of academic skills workshops strongly enough early on. Obviously, major aspects of university are autonomy and independence, but still, I feel as though some things should be more insisted upon by the university for certain demographics. I feel similarly regarding support services and academic advisors. Not wanting to be a burden dissuaded me from seeking services that would have likely been a benefit to me. This makes me think that they should possibly be pushed as a worry-free, normalised avenue more than they currently are.
That said, the moments that eased my anxiety most were when tutorials were provided on things like Blackboard and staff intentionally went out of their way to alleviate academic ambiguity. While mature and first-in-family students typically do not lack capability or drive, we lack institutional and academic familiarity. By rethinking early induction events, making a special effort to ensure non-traditional students know about, and attend, flexible orientation drop-ins (which also connects them with peer mentors who share similar backgrounds), staff can help non-traditional students move past imposter syndrome and thrive from day one, in my view.
Mathew Simm is a Korean / East Asian Studies final year student returning to university after a year abroad and a subsequent leave of absence period due to extenuating circumstances, and is currently navigating the transition back into university life once again.