Shelf Help: University Life

Want to make the most out of being a student? Award-winning mental health specialist Dr Dominique Thompson explores issues around leaving home, exam stress, socialising, safety, sex, and drugs, to help you succeed and truly enjoy your time as a student.

Complemented by insights from real students, this useful guide provides credible advice, practical tips and exercises to help you safely navigate the unique pressures and opportunities that student life brings. Easy-to-read, visually appealing and convenient to carry, it's a non-judgemental toolkit for happiness and confidence. Stay Balanced While You Study is a handy addition for those already in higher and further education

A FLY Girl's Guide to University is a collection of memoirs, essays, poetry and prose from four women of colour who studied at the University of Cambridge. It is a multifaceted calling out of the wrongness underpinning their shared experience at Cambridge, and the experiences of others in similar institutions throughout the UK. But they describe it best: 'The purpose of our book is simple: we believe that our lives, our experiences, and our voices matter, especially in a place of power, pervasive whiteness and exclusivity. Our voices not only deserve to be heard but must be because the 'Cambridge experience' of a middle-class, white, cisgendered, able-bodied man is not the only one. Ours cannot be silenced'.

Packed full of helpful advice, hints and links, the book includes:
What to expect when starting university including Freshers’ Week, making friends and coping with the course
Money: how much they’re likely to have, where it comes from, where it goes and – crucially – how to get more of it. Also, how to budget and what happens when it comes to paying off loans
Living without parents e.g. laundry, cooking, budgeting. And advice if living at home
Staying safe at university
Wellbeing advice: from friendships and relationships to new student blues and getting professional help if things become more serious
How to have the best possible experience should they find themselves at university under Covid conditions

This book is at once an exploration, a dance in the dark, an invocation to intellectual openness and to dwelling; the authors write in their introduction that it: 'addresses the insecurity, uncertainty and fears that attend having one's being in the university and considers these as virtues rather than as failings. We offer this little book as a gift.'