I returned to uni for freshers’ week 20 years after leaving. Here’s what has changed

There’s more teetotalism – and students are more likely to have a job. As term begins, our writer visits Glasgow, her alma mater, to hear the hopes and fears of four first-years

In the autumn of 1997, I was a fresher at the University of Glasgow. Months after the Labour landslide, weeks after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, I was an 18-year-old British-Indian made up of equal parts teenage kicks, terror and Topshop – and on my way to Scotland for the first time, to live and study in a city I had never even visited. I was a 90s Londoner in every sense: geographically ignorant, cocky, earnestly carrying a pager. North, to me, meant north of the Thames. Yet there I was, on a train nosing true north on the west coast mainline.

At Euston station, I was waved off by my parents. I remember nothing of this momentous goodbye. In Carlisle, I felt a great sense of occasion because I thought we had crossed the border. By Motherwell, I was all grown up. In Glasgow, seeing the towering gothic spire of the fourth oldest university in the UK from my cab window, I thought it was the cathedral. When the driver informed me that it was, in fact, my university, I gasped. Had I even seen the prospectus?

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