At the beginning of my second year at University, my peers and I were offered the chance to apply to become a peer advisor. Peer advisors primarily help first year students on the course and offer special advice on the course and being at University in general. I saw this as a great opportunity to improve on my people skills and share what I learnt during my own time in first year.

I subsequently applied and was fortunately accepted to take a role along with some of my fellow course mates. The main part of the job required me to attend meetings with a group of first years at the local student study areas to discuss any problems they had with the course, university accommodation, money worries and anything else on their minds.I gave each of them my contact information if anyone wanted to get in touch in between the scheduled meetings.

To begin with, meeting new people and offering advice (having made a number of mistakes in first year) was very rewarding. However, after a few meetings the attendance from the first year students began to drop, and towards the end of the semester there were occasions where less first years turned up than peer advisors. It was a real shame that having given up a lot of my personal time to make the meetings, my second year course mates and I were shown a lack of consideration. It is because of this experience, I will not be applying to help out again next year as I think my time could be better spent doing other things.