Starting university is an excellent example of an exciting life-event, full of changes, challenges and many demands on individual resources and capabilities as the article shows.
Changes in family relations, seeking independence, new social networks, finding new academic demands and making adaptations to new styles of living.
The students described vividly the turmoil and the ambivalence they felt during this early period. Most of the students had left the parental home for the first time when they began their studies. This created emotional ambiguities – they felt homesick and guilty about leaving their parents, but also enjoyed their new-found freedom.
However, many struggled with the difficulties of independent living, such as structuring their day, household chores, planning their economy and developing autonomous study skills. Obviously, their previous work-strategies - characterised by dependency on others, mainly parents and secondary school teachers - was no longer adaptive in the new context.
Great variability in their coping strategies was evident. Some clung desperately to their home-base for a while, phoning their mother three times a day, taking laundry home and even bringing home-prepared meals back to university. Others remained passive and did nothing – did not clean their room, lived on takeaways, over-spent their money, and slept all day. This was often combined with cries that nobody helped them!