Following on from our Part I Guide, Kate from our Mental Health & Wellbeing Team, provides helpful reminders and tips for navigating your new life in the UK.
Bringing a piece of home here / connecting to your home country
There is nothing wrong with wanting to connect to home, even while trying to feel at home in a new place. This will help you to feel comfortable and connect with others as you share facts / parts of your identity from your home culture. It can also help with homesickness too. Can you find ingredients here to make your favourite recipe from home? Do you have a favourite drink from home? Can you decorate your room with artwork / pictures of home or ornaments that represent your home life? What about watching your favourite show / listening to music / podcasts which remind you of home?
Can you connect with those around you by sharing something from your home country and asking them to show you something of theirs from their cultural background?
Helpful reminders when you are struggling
- This experience won’t last forever – there is an end date to work towards
- I may never live in the UK again, what would I love to look back on and be happy that I experienced in my time here?
- What outside of the university and my studies would I also love to try and experience here?
- I get to not only explore a new place but explore myself more. Living in a new country can allow us to live authentically – no one knows us here. Perhaps now is a great opportunity to express your true self from day 1?
- Your friends / family from home are only a phone call away
- This is a wonderful opportunity for friends / family to visit you if possible
- Every day that you are living abroad you are growing as a person – outside of your comfort zone. This will increase your confidence even if just by a small amount – what an amazing gift to yourself!
What it’s normal to feel
Add anything else you can think of to this list. This helps remind us that it’s okay to feel. You’re not the only person who could be feeling this way. At times, your experience abroad is going to be full of mixed emotions!
- I feel like a foreigner and that I stand out, sometimes this makes me feel vulnerable and exposed
- The more used to life in the UK I feel, the more different I feel from my ‘old self’
- As a result I feel like a foreigner in my life in the UK but I also feel like I don’t connect to my old life and home country as much anymore either
- I am missing my home country
- I sometimes wonder why I am here in the UK
- I miss my friends and family
- I am sacrificing going to events that are happening at home while I am here in the UK
- I really want to make this time in the UK count! Sometimes that’s motivating and other times it’s really pressurising
- Did I make a mistake in coming here? I feel so homesick
- I am so proud of myself for making this move abroad! Not everyone I know could do this or have the opportunity to do it
- What did that person say?!
- I’m nervous talking English!
- Let’s squeeze as much as I can out of this experience!
- Wow the UK has a lot of accents!
- Celebrating all the small wins that feel so big – like … understanding everything that was said when buying something in a shop, ordering at a café and being able to read most things on the menu, understanding a lecture when the lecturer has an accent you’ve never heard before, trying a new English food or drink
It’s an incredible achievement to uproot your life and move abroad. Huge well done.
Top tips
- Explore and travel – buy a bus pass or train pass or hire/buy a car if you can afford to.
- Join local groups – walking groups, gym classes, art groups, book clubs – find and connect to a community outside or inside the university.
- Find people from your nationality to feel connected to home. But try not to just stay with this group of people – broaden your horizons of connections to people from different nationalities so you don’t feel isolated to one social group of people.
- Let out how you feel – connect to our Mental Health and Wellbeing Service and access support that you need.
- In your diary (if possible) plan a trip home or plan when you will next see someone from home. Or plan a phone call to someone at home.
- Join a university society.
- Keep busy.
- Use this as an opportunity to travel / experience other places. Finding cheap flights/trains/buses to mainland Europe countries or Ireland, Scotland, Wales & the Channel Islands.
- Photograph your experience – you will always have these photos to look back on as a reminder of your achievements of moving abroad. A nice project can also be to scrapbook your experience here on a day where you feel lonely or sad. Each photograph is a reminder of how well you are doing.
A reminder, that if you need any help and support during your studies, you can contact University Student Services via the Student Enquiry Point.
By Kate Strong, Mental Health Case Worker