Over the last few weeks i have been inundated with calls, emails and personal visits from students and parents worried sick about what their university experience is going to be like because they failed to get their first choice accomodation on the Vale Village.
As an ex-Vale student, i love the Vale as much as anybody else, but does it really deserve to be held up higher than any other hall village? Is a lakeside view really that important?
I have had the extremely rare fortune of being a Hall President to two very different halls, and as such i like to think that i've learnt some valuable lessons about the range of accomodation we offer here at Birmingham.
Hall 1:
In my first year i lived in Tennis Courts, and was elected RA President in December 2006. Tennis Courts is a very large hall situated on the Vale. Comprised mainly of Freshers, Tennis Courts houses 700 residents.
I LOVED my time in Tennis Courts. The community atmosphere was fantastic, the socials were amazing and the memories are some which i will treasure forever. When asked, i reckon by far the majority of TCers would say that they lived in the best hall of residence at University.
Hall 2:
In my second year i was asked to take over as Emergency RA President for Queen's Hospital Close (QHC). QHC is a smallish sized hall which is privately owned and situated in the City Centre (well away from campus). The term before i took over, the University had intended not to use QHC as an official hall for the following year. However because of horrific overbookings, the University was forced to buy back bedspaces from QHC, with Freshers being allocated a place in a hall that they didn't even know existed. As such, i had to lead an RA team that had been set up at 2 weeks notice.
I accepted the post with a fairly large degree of cynicism. I wanted to make sure that QHC residents were still able to have a Freshers Week despite all the cock-ups, but i never imagined that QHC would be anywhere near as good as Tennis Courts. Having led a 700 strong TC army for the last year, i refused to believe that anywhere could even come close to being as brilliant.
How wrong i was! Despite the difficulties QHC residents stepped up in a manner i would not believe possible. During Freshers Week they charged out to the clubs and shouted down halls twice their size chanting 'QHC!' as loud as they possibly could. They attended sports trials, pub quizzes, tours of the city and many other events. Best of all, when it came to electing their own RA committee to replace my emergency team, they did so with a voter turnout that beat every single other hall across the University. In short, 300 students, none of whom had put QHC down as ANY choice, let alone their first, came together to create an incredible hall community that far outclassed some of the more established halls on the Vale. Why? Because they were given the chance to get involved and they took it.
I guess the point of this blog is to reassure those who did not get their first choice accomodation that no matter where you end up, you will have the chance to enjoy an incredible Freshers experience. Living in a hall is like joining a private community, and it instills a sense of patriotism in you. One of the most important parts of my job, (through leading the Hall Committees, lobbying the University, organising Welcome Week etc) is to try and make it so that you come away at the end of the year genuinely believing that you wouldn't have wanted to live anywhere else.
So if you've got a place on the Vale, congratulations! And if you have got a place somewhere else, congratulations! You're a student at the University of Birmingham, and you're going to have an incredible year!
If you have any comments about this blog (whether you are a new fresher or an older student) then feel free to have your say!