ALICE HINDS

If I’m entirely honest, I don’t remember much of my first week at Stirling University.

If I think back to those days in September 2009, I can muster up a few blurry scenes – dark, sticky-floored clubs, walking barefoot home to my halls as the sun rose over the campus lake, the taste of sickly sweet £2.50 wine, sipped straight from the bottle.

Freshers at St Andrews The memories may be as fuzzy as a hangover headache, but that’s exactly how we should remember our first foray into adulthood. For me, university seemed the expected next step with OK exam marks and the expectation of supportive parents, who ignored my arguments – after all, who needs a degree to be a writer?

I was right, of course, you don’t need a certificate to prove you can string a few sentences together. But my parents knew something my arrogant 18-year-old self did not – university is about more than lectures and course work. It’s about learning who you are, growing as a person and, probably most importantly of all, making friends for life.

That’s why I feel so sorry for the teenagers who will spend the first weeks of university career alone in their rooms, staring at strange faces on a computer screen in lieu of real freshers’ week events. They won’t have those first exciting days, filled with little sleep and cheap booze – foolish experiences, which help cement the kind of bonds that never break.

Maybe they will, online, but unlike the kind-faced girl who I met in my halls, their laptop won’t hold back their hair when they’re sick or wipe away their tears when a boy breaks their heart.

More than a decade has passed since then, and although a lot has changed (my taste in wine for one but, unfortunately, not my choice of men), I still count my fellow Stirling survivors as best friends. I feel sorry the class of 2020 might not be able to do the same.