My name is Emily – affectionately known as EJ. I’m 21 and in my second year of studying Marketing and Spanish. I live off campus in a house of eight people and I’m in County College. Interesting fact: I have a questionable tattoo of a watermelon turtle on my ankle.
Monday, 13 November
It was a heavy start to the week with a two-hour Marketing lecture at 9am. Afterwards, I went to meet my mum and brother, who were still up from the weekend, at the Lancaster House Hotel. It’s so luxurious in there! We went for lunch and sat by the fire with hot chocolates, feeling very cosy and autumnal.
I said my goodbyes and rushed off to a Spanish seminar where we learned about accent rules, which was extremely confusing. Then I went to the library for a few hours because I got no work done over the weekend. I also had to post the team list up for our match on Wednesday, as I’m in charge of the social media for Women’s Rugby.
I went to bed with about five layers on that night because it was freezing in our house. We have to pay bills now and are trying not to put the heating on!
Tuesday, 14 November
I got a lift with my housemate to the University at around 10am. I had a group meeting for my Marketing research project and planned out how to conduct our focus groups; we are collecting data on Skype use among students.
I had four seminars back-to-back today, so it was quite hectic: Spanish Grammar, then Marketing Research, Consumer Behaviour and, finally, Spanish History. Then I went straight to an Enactus session, where we had a workshop with Peter Sewell, a careers coach from the Management School.
After that, I attended an Enactus project team meeting where we organised our salad stall for Thursday. I came home and prepped some meals for the next few days and played Mario Kart with my housemate, Patrick. Unsurprisingly, I lost!
Wednesday, 15 November
Today, I was up early to attend a student-staff committee meeting because I’m an Academic Rep for my course. Afterwards, I hurried off to my Spanish seminar (five minutes to get from Charles Carter to Bowland North – no chance!).
Then, I had an Exec meeting for Women’s Rugby at LUSU where we discussed our annual tour which I am organising. There are so many forms to fill out: who would have thought going on holiday would be so stressful?
It was soon time to head to the Sports Centre for our match against Durham. We blasted some tunes in the changing rooms to get everyone pumped for the game. It was well-fought with tough competition, but we pulled it off and won 17-10! We all headed to Bowland bar afterwards to celebrate, where we did our customary Match Wins and Match Fines (discussing what people did well and badly in the game). I then went to meet my friend Charli to head down to the courts for netball training, as we both do college netball for County.
Thursday, 16 November
For my Enactus project, we run a salad stall at the Farmers’ market to provide work experience for people with autism. We met the people we were working with in the morning, prepped the salads and then set up our stall in Alexandra Square at 12pm. The first hour was pretty slow but after that the salads were flying off and we sold out before we were due to close!
Afterwards, I went to a Commercial Awareness workshop with a representative from ICAEW. We had to read and discuss a brief about Adidas and work in small groups to identify Adidas’ strengths, opportunities and threats.
Later on, I got changed into sports gear and went to warm up for my netball match against the Medballers, the Medicine students’ netball team. It was a tough match and sadly we lost but we kept in high spirits because, after all, it’s the taking part that counts (and the fact that most of us just do netball for the socials!).
Friday, 17 November
I had a Marketing lecture from 10-12 this morning which went through how to analyse and interpret qualitative data. It was quite interesting and interactive as we had to write a creative story about graduate life and then analyse and code the stories according to their themes.
Later, I went to the Management School to study, and take a call from a sports holiday company about organising a tour, then went to rugby training where we taught the freshers how to do line outs. They had fun being lifted in the air!
Unfortunately, I had a nightmare getting home because we had to wait 45 minutes for a bus as so many drove past us. When I finally made it home, I had a curry and chilled night in with my friends.
Saturday, 18 November
I got a few friends together to do a focus group for my Marketing project in the evening. It was so hard trying to get them to take it seriously! That night, my friend was having a house party for her birthday so a few of the rugby girls and I went. It was St. Trinian’s-themed, so we dressed in our best schoolgirl attire.
After too much punch and too many jelly shots, we headed out to Sugarhouse. I don’t really remember the rest of the night, to be honest, but I’m sure it was great!
Sunday, 19 November
I woke up very hungover at about 2pm and came downstairs to my housemates grilling me on why, exactly, I had decided to bring home a traffic road sign last night. They were not impressed! Disclaimer: I took it back to its original place in the road.
Apart from that, doing anything productive today was a struggle! I ended the week watching I’m a Celeb with my housemates (ironically, of course), pretending I didn’t have any work to do.
