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Leaving your family home to go to university is not always easy. Read the advice from a first-year student and her dad to get two points of view on the experience.
Task 1.
Match the things you need to know when leaving home with their description and write a–e next to the numbers 1–5.
1…….. How to budget
2…….. How to cook
3…….. How to make friends
4…….. How to be professional
5…….. How to be independent
a. Learn some
simple, cheap and healthy recipes to impress your flatmates.
b. Be slightly formal when emailing university lecturers.
Don't post anything on social media you wouldn't want
employers to see.
c. Plan to
minimise debt, pay all the bills, eat and still have enough money for some fun.
d. Take responsibility for yourself. Manage your time and
balance your social life with your
studies.
e. Relax, be yourself, and don't feel you have to be cool.
Leaving home
Going away to university is always a
tricky time, both for the students who are leaving home and their parents who
are staying behind. We got advice on how to cope from a student daughter and
her dad.
A daughter’s advice
to parents, by Kerry Price
My parents drove me to uni at the
beginning of the first term. That was great, but then they hung around, so it
was hard to chat to the people in the rooms near mine. It’s best if you leave
us to unpack ourselves.
Don’t ask us to come home during term
time. There’s a lot going on at weekends, there just isn’t time.
Get another interest or a pet if you feel
lonely without us. Don’t make us feel guilty about leaving home!
It is quite interesting to hear about your
experiences at uni, but remember that it was a LONG time ago so don’t go on
about it so much. Things have changed a lot. Now we have a lot more debt and
it’ll be harder to find a job in the future.
Please don’t check up on us or our friends
on Facebook. I know it’s a public site, but we have the right to some privacy.
Don’t change anything in our bedrooms. We
have only half left home - we’ll be back in the holidays, so please don’t touch
anything.
We’d still like to come on family holidays
with you. Don’t forget to include us just because we’re not there all the time.
A father’s advice
to students, by Stuart Price
Don’t complain so much about how much work
you have to do. We work a lot too. You’re an adult now, get used to it.
Put up with the fact that we refused to
get a dog while you were at home, then suddenly bought one as soon as you moved
out. We miss you!
Just because you’re at university studying
very complex subjects, it doesn’t mean that you’re more intelligent than
everybody else. Don’t treat your family as if they were stupid; we’re really
not.
Let us come and visit you now and again.
We promise to try not to embarrass you in front of your friends. We just want
to see you for a short time and take you out for a meal.
Don’t waste so much time on Facebook. You
need time for all that work you have to do, remember?
We might make a few changes to your room,
so deal with it. It’s great to have a guest room at last, but we won’t change
things too much, promise.
Don’t forget to call home from time to
time and don’t get annoyed if we phone you. It’s not pestering. If we didn’t
call, you wouldn’t know that we care.
Task
2. Circle the best option to
complete these sentences.
1. When children leave home to go to university, it's ___.
a. the moment they've been waiting for
b. a difficult experience
c. more difficult for parents than for children
d. more difficult for children than for parents
2. Kerry says when students first go to uni, parents should
___.
a. give their children a lift and then stay a while
b. give them a lift and then leave
c. let their children find their own transport
d. help them unpack their things
3. Kerry thinks students should ___.
a. do everything they can to avoid upsetting lonely parents
b. go home regularly while everyone gets used to the change
c. not feel bad about spending weekends in their university
town
d. avoid visiting their parents too much during term time
4. Kerry thinks Facebook is ___.
a. a good way to send private messages to family
b. a good way to show her parents what she's doing with her
friends
c. a space that parents should keep away from
d. great for parents as long as you're careful with your
privacy settings
5. Stuart thinks students sometimes ___.
a. look down on people who are not studying
b. ask for help with their work too much
c. talk about their university subjects too much
d. forget that their parents were young once
6. Stuart says parents would like to ___.
a. stay for at least one night when they visit
b. meet their son or daughter's university friends
c. come and visit at least once a fortnight
d. visit every so often and go to a restaurant together
7. Stuart is ___.
a. hurt that his daughter won't talk to him on Facebook
b. critical of the amount of time his daughter spends on
Facebook
c. a big fan of Facebook
d. confused about how to use Facebook properly
8. Stuart promises to ___.
a. make only minimal changes to his daughter's bedroom
b. keep his daughter's bedroom exactly as she left it
c. redecorate his daughter's bedroom and turn it into a
guest bedroom
d. clean his daughter's old room before she comes back to
visit
Task 3 Complete the gaps with
a verb phrase from the box.
|
take her out hang around going on put up with leave home check up
on give her a lift go on about |
1. The text gives two points of view about the difficult
time when young people _______________.
2. Kerry was happy that her parents agreed to
_______________ when she first went to uni.
3. Kerry advises parents not to _______________ while their
children are trying to chat to their new
roommates.
4. Kerry says students can't come home at weekends because
there's so much _______________.
5. Kerry wishes her parents wouldn't _______________ their
university days so much.
6. Kerry says parents should not use Facebook to
_______________ their children.
7. Stuart thinks children just have to _______________ the
fact that their parents might get a pet
when they leave.
8. Stuart says he would like to see Kerry occasionally and
_______________ for dinner.
Discussion
Do you agree with Kerry’s advice?
Are you looking forward to leaving home? Why or why not?
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