University Socials

Every year around September/October time when new students are taking in their first experiences of uni life, there always seems to be wholly negative news coverage of sports and society initiations. For those of you unaccustomed to this, in simple terms, most sports teams and some other societies at University require freshers to take part in their initiations before they are viewed as fully fledged members of the group.

Doing a drinking boat race at my initiations last year

Onion munching

Out in our lovely granny pants after initations

Of course there are some that take these initiation processes to the extreme, however I believe they have been given a bad name and tarnished by those few who have taken their initiation 'games' too far.

From my experience as a fresher to the tennis team last year, I can honestly say it was of the most memorable evenings of that year, but for positive not negative reasons. A 4th year told us that the approach the team always took with initiations was that the night was for everyone to have a good time, to be a bit silly and whilst there would be things that I probably wouldn't choose to do on a regular basis, there was going to be nothing too extreme. By that I mean we would be asked to be involved with a game where all the freshers selected an egg from a box where all were hard boiled apart from two, and to find out whether you had a hard boiled one or not, you had to crack it on your head. Pretty amusing to say the least, and I even got the runny egg. There were drinking games galore and other things that went on during the night; eating an onion and all the freshers wearing very large granny pants over our clothes to name a few. But the games were designed to get to know us and lightly poke fun of us as we were the new ones, not to humiliate or force us into things we didn't want to do.

From what I heard of other teams at the University, everyone seemed to have a similar experience of having fairly embarrassing tasks to do but nothing over the top or unsafe. So I would be interested to know your opinion on initiations, are you looking forward to yours or do you know of any that have been far too extreme?

Georgie X