Top tips to make friends when starting university as an international student

Mechanical and Electrical Engineering student Zaid moved from his home country to Aberdeen to start his academic journey at RGU and shares his tried and tested techniques to make friends when starting from scratch.

When I first arrived in Aberdeen, I thought making friends would be a pretty daunting task as it was a pretty big move going from an environment I was used to, to an entirely new one with even more responsibilities to juggle. However, the more time I spent here, the more I realised how truly easy it was to make new connections as a student at RGU. Here are a few opportunities to take advantage of:

Student Accommodation

When you first arrive in Aberdeen and get yourself situated in your accommodation, it’s best to get to know your surroundings. You may meet fellow students around and about and saying hello never hurts. After all, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, being open and willing to engage with other people will always yield fruitful results.

If the idea of being open with strangers is not appealing, those of you who are lucky enough to stay in an RGU’s student accommodation such as Woolmanhill will get the opportunity to interact with flatmates and may make friends for life. This was how most of my friends knew each other prior to me getting to know them.

Inductions

As an engineering student at RGU, I had a lengthy induction week full of fun activities aimed at introducing each module to us first years. Some of these activities, such as designing a model bridge out of popsicle sticks, required us to be in groups. This enabled a lot of us to communicate with each other and learn about our interests, its an easy way to make friends.

Even when there wasn’t a group activity involved, I felt comfortable around my classmates since I was surrounded by people who have a shared passion, which made it a lot easier to start up conversations. I asked people naturally what brought them to engineering and it may surprise you as it did me, most of us started the same way with our passions whether it be admiring cars and engines or even having a basic interest in maths. I formed connections that helped me through the semester during that induction week.

Students’ Union Societies

During Induction Week, I came to know of the large assortment of societies available for me to join, such as the RGU Motorsport Society, or even societies based on different home countries. The societies will inform you of events and dinners which are easy places to meet and socialise with everyone present. They are meant for you to make friends and long lasting connections.

Bus Journeys

As silly as this sounds, since I take the bus every morning from the Music Hall to RGU to get to my lectures, a lot of familiar faces and some not so familiar show up. With the bus often being full in the morning, I get to sit next to people that I sometimes recognise from the University and even from my course. It’s always a good way to talk about the work or assignments we have due. This also makes time begin to fly, and before I know it, the bus stops at RGU. It’s easy to communicate with someone to circumvent the boredom of sitting on the bus!

Lectures and Group Work

In my experience in quite a few of the lectures I had, the lecturers actively asked us to form groups to answer tough or intriguing questions. This led to a lot of engagement during the lectures that enabled me to get to know people within my module while getting work done and enhancing my learning experience.

This was not limited to lectures itself, especially in engineering. In my second semester, for one of my modules we had to form groups of three random individuals from the class to work for the next six weeks together to build a white line follower. Considering we were stuck together for the next six weeks and our grades would be affected by the work we did, we did well to get to know each other to maximise our potential.

At first it’ll be difficult to be put out of your element, as I was, but over time you will learn to overcome differences and understand people and form friendships from group work which makes it all the more fun!

University Events

RGU has a plethora of events available during the year such as Open Days and the yearly RGU Hack. My work as a Student Ambassador for RGU allowed me to meet fellow ambassadors during these days when we were assisting with the event. It was interesting since we were all from different backgrounds, but RGU being a melting point of diverse cultures allowed us to meet.

During the Open Days, it was easy to get to know people as a few of them came up to me to ask for assistance, which allowed me to know them better including their dreams and ambitions. Some of them wanted to enrol in Engineering, which I took great pride in sharing that I was doing the same course. This enabled me to make a few new friends coming next intake.

The yearly hackathon has groups of students competing over 48 hours to complete a challenge, staying overnight at the University and eating snacks while coding away. It was an awesome experience especially getting to know fellow teammates and teams.

While making friends may seem like a daunting and difficult task, the advice I would give to anyone wanting to make new friends at RGU or in Aberdeen is to just be yourself. The city is welcoming and even more so its people. Don’t be afraid to take a leap of faith and engage in conversation with a stranger. I can guarantee that you will make new friends like I did!

Zaid Raza