Local communities
When you’re engaged in research it can be easy for the university to become your whole world. For some, it can be a workplace, a social space and even a living space too. When the time does come to engage with the outside world, this can often be for short or simply practical reasons. You might go to the pub with uni friends or the supermarket for a weekly shop. This is, at least, how I have often connected with the wider area surrounding my university.
In my undergraduate days this didn’t seem too strange. I knew people exclusively through university, and even when we socialised outside of the university, my life just didn’t seem to cross over with anyone beyond my student groups. Perhaps that was because London is just so large, so I stayed safely within the student groups that I knew. But I now live in a small Welsh town, and I’ve found that the community there feels really close to me – so I’m beginning to see my time in the town itself as more than just an extension of my university life.
This is surely a good thing. One of the great traps of university, especially in postgraduate study, is how it dominates your life. I may control my own schedule most of the time, but with all the work I need to get done that still means regular nine-to-five days in the library. Where I’m studying for my PhD, the university is basically within the town but to get there is still a trek down a considerable hill – which usually means that I’m spending at least an hour there when I go.
Still, I feel that making the journey into town is important to keep me sane through all the demands of postgraduate life. I have even been considering more ways I could connect with the town community, such as looking at events and groups that run within it. For while it may often feel like it as a postgraduate research student, university is categorically not all there is to life – and spending time getting to know a new environment can be incredibly beneficial.