So if you've been reading my blog for a while or you just happen to be lucky enough to know me well, you'll know that I went to university in Lincoln in 2016, dropped out, and then after a lot of soul searching and trying to decide what I was -actually- good at, I decided to have another go at the whole uni thing in 2017 at Sheffield Hallam.

Honestly, I'm so glad that I didn't stay at Lincoln, I've got nothing against the uni, it was the one I chose originally and I still love the campus, I have friends who go there and love it, but I'm so happy I didn't stay on a course that wasn't right for me.

I was originally going to study fine art, as I've always been very arty and creative and I've always known I wanted to go into a creative field, however at the time of choosing the course I had no career ideas other than that I wanted something creative. I think fine art as a course was just a bit too broad for me, once I was there it didn't feel like it was something I wanted to do but something I'd picked at default, I wasn't excited to do it. Sure I loved art, and still do, but I feel that taking that time out and finding my bearings really helped me to decide what career path I actually wanted to go down. In the end I chose graphic design, I knew I wanted to do that course before I'd even thought about applying for the Sheffield, I wanted something closer to home and Sheffield was a great fit, but mainly I cared more about picking the right course than what the uni was like as a whole.

So on to the actual point of this blog post, when it got around to picking accommodation I wanted somewhere that would be big enough to be interesting but not so big that it wouldn't feel homely. I weighed up a lot of different options and went and looked around a few different options for accommodation. I ended up choosing 'Exchange Works' which is uni accommodation provided by Unite Students, who run most of the bigger accom buildings in Sheff centre.

Now I had my fair share of shit times staying at Exchange Works, my flat mates didn’t get on and it felt incredibly tense all the time in our flat, but I guess that’s just luck of the draw when your staying in randomly assigned student accommodation with strangers. I’m not going to sugar coat it but I had the worst year staying in that flat, it gave me really bad anxiety whenever I was there, and overall I’m really glad I’m not staying there anymore, but I don’t want to let my bad times overshadow this review because hey it’s not Unite Students’ fault that we didn’t get on. So to make sure I’m being fair I want to create a little scoring system for this review. I’ve separated my review into 5 sections; Room Quality, Safety, Social, Cleanliness, and Location - all of these will be given a rating out of 5, and I’ll talk a bit about how I decided on that score.