ABSTRACT
Embarking on university study has always been exciting anddisorientating in almost equal measure. The celebratedeighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon went up to Oxford full of high hopes only to find that his tutors took no interest in him beyond the rather vague recommendation that ‘You must read.’ He left Oxford after 14 months, looking back on his time as ‘the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life’. University life has changed a lot since then, but it is still the case that many students risk Gibbonian levels of disappointment by arriving with only a vague notion of what to expect of university and what will be expected of them.
