From Lahore to London: A Pakistani Student's Real First Year at UK University

This account is written in the voice of a Gohata Global student who graduated from the University of Manchester in 2024 and agreed to share their experience candidly. Names have been changed at their request.

The Day I Landed

I arrived at Manchester Airport on a grey September afternoon with two suitcases, a laptop, and twelve months of expectations compressed into my chest. My family had seen me off at Allama Iqbal International with a crowd of aunts and uncles who had never been abroad and imagined England as some perfected version of everything Pakistan was not. I had spent the preceding weeks watching YouTube videos of university dorm rooms and making lists of things I would need. None of that prepared me for the loneliness of the first week.

The First Month

Everyone who goes through international student orientation will tell you the same thing: it is exhausting. Not because the activities are difficult, but because you are performing a version of yourself, the confident, sociable, international student, while internally processing a kind of displacement that you do not have a vocabulary for. I shared a flat with two students from Nigeria, one from China, and one from Germany. We were polite. We made tea. We ate separately. For the first three weeks, I called my mother every morning and cried after hanging up.

What Actually Helped

The Manchester Pakistani Students' Association changed everything. Not because I wanted to only be around Pakistanis, that had been my worst fear about studying abroad, that I would simply recreate Pakistan in another country, but because having a community of people who understood where I came from made me feel safe enough to explore where I was going. I made Pakistani friends who introduced me to British friends who introduced me to a world beyond the university.

Academics: The Real Shock

My first essay received a 52, a pass, barely. The tutor's feedback said my argument was descriptive rather than analytical and that I needed to engage critically with the sources rather than summarise them. I had never written an academic essay in my life that was not a summary of what the textbook said. In Pakistan, knowing the content is enough. In a British university, knowing the content is the entry ticket. What you are actually being graded on is what you think about it.

By the End of Year One

My grades had risen from a 52 in the first essay to a 72 on my year-end project. I had made five close friends, two Pakistani, one British-Indian, one Nigerian, one Irish. I had worked 15 hours a week at a supermarket near the university. I had eaten dim sum for the first time, watched cricket in an English pub, walked through the Lake District, and spent a weekend in Edinburgh. I had also spent nine hours on the phone with my parents when my grandmother passed away in Lahore and could not go home. I had grown up in ways that are genuinely impossible to describe to someone who has not done it.

What I Would Tell Every Pakistani Student

Do not go abroad to find comfort. You have comfort in Pakistan. Go abroad to find something you do not yet know you are capable of. The first three months will be the hardest of your life. Stay.