How to cope with loneliness in your first year of university

Robert Medhurst spent most of his freshers’ week looking at social media, reading posts about other students’ fun nights out.

“I was just in bed,” Robert recalls, describing the week as the loneliest time of his life.

Robert’s flatmates didn’t go out much, and his course didn’t feel very sociable.

Despite putting himself out there by going to taster sessions for various societies, he couldn’t find his people.

“I started to lose my confidence,” he says. “I felt like people didn’t want to be friends with me, or they didn’t like me.”

Initially, Robert had no intention of going to university and had a job offer for after sixth form. But then he saw his friends living it up as students on Instagram and Snapchat.

“When you’ve got to get up for work on Thursday at 9:00 and you see someone’s been out on Wednesday night, you do start thinking the grass is greener,” Robert says.

Sick of the FOMO, and wanting to keep his career options open, Robert decided to apply to Nottingham Trent to study business. He chose the university because of its reputation for student life: “I did so much research to make sure I was confident in my choice.”

But in a matter of days, Robert was considering dropping out.

“Social media makes it worse,” he says of those early months of his first year, explaining that other people’s posts about student life can make it feel like “everyone’s getting along, but I’m not”.

In a TikTok video, Robert posted about feeling lonely during freshers’ week. The comments section was flooded with other students sharing similar experiences.

TV shows and social media can glorify the idea of student life. Lots of people come to university with high expectations for what they think could be the best years of their lives: living with their friends, going on nights out, studying a subject they love, and getting stuck in with a new sport or hobby.

But for some, the experience isn’t what they expect.

Some students come to university with “rose-tinted glasses”, says Lauren Howard, who manages counselling services at the University of Bradford.

In a poll of freshers in their first week at Swansea University, students’ biggest concern was fitting in and feeling included, says Joanne Parfitt, the university’s associate director of transition and progression.

And in a survey by market research agency Cibyl, 17% of students said they had no friends at university and 37% said they worried daily or weekly about making friends.

“[New students] find it quite daunting because if you’ve left school or sixth form, you have your friendship groups that you have to leave,” Ms Parfitt says. “For some, it’s an opportunity to start again and create a new identity. But for many, it’s really daunting.”

Alisha Miah’s TikTok feed was full of videos of girls having fun while living together in student houses – having movie nights and picnics, going on trips together.

But when Alisha moved from London to Sheffield in September 2024 to study journalism, she found freshers’ week “overwhelming” because of how much alcohol it involved.

Alisha doesn’t drink and had never been clubbing before.

“I did spend a lot of freshers’ week in my room,” she says. “I just felt a bit alienated.”

This continued over Alisha’s first few months at university. “I felt anxious when socialising,” she says. “I also feel I didn’t put myself out there enough.”

Like Robert, Alisha considered dropping out or switching courses, but decided not to because she felt she was at university to study, not to make friends.

In a 2025 survey of more than 10,000 undergraduate students by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and the charity Advance HE, 29% said they had considered dropping out.

The most common reason, was their mental and emotional health, followed by financial concerns.

As new students navigate trying to make friends, living away from family and potentially budgeting for the first time, “it’s difficult to imagine a more challenging time”, says Mrs Howard, from the University of Bradford.

“Anxiety about all of these different things is massively common, and normal.”

Though Christina Aaliyah Davis enjoyed her time studying medicine at Newcastle University, she says it wasn’t the “utopia of friendship” her family told her it would be.

“It was almost like there was this pressure to see university as this magical, friendly place where everyone is singing and dancing together,” the 24-year-old doctor says.

When she was in sixth form, she dreamed of having dinners with her university flatmates and hosting Halloween parties. But Christina wasn’t very close to her first-year flatmates and sometimes felt lonely.

“I felt like I missed out a little bit,” she says.

With time, Robert, Alisha and Christina all found their feet and developed friendships.

Alisha made friends through her course and through TikTok, while Christina felt happier once she was able to move in with friends after her first year.

For Robert, now 24 and in his final year, it was joining his university’s drama society and getting a part-time job at a bar that helped him make friends. He also enjoyed volunteering at freshers’ week in his second and third years, helping new students settle in.

Robert’s advice to first-year students struggling to socialise is to just “get out of your room” and go to club and society taster events until you find one you enjoy. And he recommends continuing to turn up, even if it feels a bit awkward at first.

“After a few weeks of consistently showing up, people recognise your face,” Robert says, “you recognise theirs, and you start making friends”.